| Sky Render said: Market trends tend to be fairly reliable. For the most part, you see a bell curve of sales for successful consoles: sales are lowest near the start, then pick up gradually over the course of a few years until supply meets demand, and then the sales slowly taper off, roughly at the same pace that they went up by (though generally speaking, the tapering off is a bit faster than the build-up). Consoles which don't take off generally hit their sales peak within their first two years, and then taper off drastically, usually with only brief recoveries during the holidays. Also noteworthy is that the number of units sold by this two-year mark is almost always 33% to 66% lower than whichever console is "winning", after curve adjustments to align the launches. It's not a constant, but it does happen most generations. There simply is no such thing as a three-way tie. The closest you get is the battle for second/third/fourth/whatever places. |
You either read my comparison, or know what you are talking about, or both.
Either way, you stole what I was gonna say.
Though I've found that, for the PS2 at least, it's biggest increase was from the 1st year to the 2nd year, while the 3rd year had a slight increase, then very small decreases the next 2 years, then the greater decreases start. Also, I noticed that Japan hardly sees any change at all. Between PS2 first year and PS2 4th year in Japan, the sales hovered around 3.5 million.
For non-dominate consoles, sales usually remain flat the first three years, then die fast. I don't see this as being the case for the PS3 and 360, so I expect increases (as the 360 has already seen 2nd year over 1st year), but not as big as the Wii, though the Wii might get stuck because of supply. Then I expect them to see fast decreases, but spread out over 3 or 4 years, instead of the normal 2 years.
I have a yearly sales prediction set up, but haven't finished it yet, so I won't bother posting it, but 6 years from launch, I have the 360 at 42 million, the PS3 at 51 million, and the Wii at 106 million. The PS2 after 6 years was at 100 million, for comparison. This yearly prediction takes into account that not more than 21 million Wiis can be sold in any given year. Now obviously, if the "blue-ocean" is much bigger than any of expect, Nintendo might jump production to upwards of 2.5 million that really throws the prediction off, simply because that shows there is more demand than we figure right now. For comparison, the PS2 sold 20 million units in it's top year.
Also note these are not "2007, 2008, 2009, etc" years, but years after launch. I.e.: 1 year for the Wii would be Nov to Nov.
We'll just have to see how large the market is, which I think we'll be able to say after this year, to really know for sure.
