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Jay520 on 02 March 2013
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Immortal said:
Mummelmann said:
Immortal said:
As long as it still outsells the PS4/720, which looks probable, sure.


How on earth does that look probable? How few consoles total do you actually expect to be sold in the 8th gen? 100 million? Even less?

OT: Personally, I don't care how much or little any of the consoles sell but I don't think that Nintendo themselves would or should be happy with sales like that, especially since they're not profitable on the hardware from launch, a smaller installed base also means severely diminshed income from software and licensing and royalties. If the Wii U ends up selling only 30-35% of the Wii, that would be a really long fall, even bigger than the PS3 - PS2, where it will likely end up around 60% or so.


Possibly. Honestly, you don't see three successive platform launches with disastrous sales (and only one of them escaping this to achieve a tolerable level) unless there's something really, really wrong with the industry.

Maybe it's smartphones, maybe it's the economy finally catching up with the industry or maybe it's something else. Either way, there is clearly external pressure that is forcing the industry to contract. To put it another way, if PSV and Wii U failed, I can't see why PS4 or 720 will manage to outdo them.

The PS4, in particular, seems completely identical to PSV in almost every way. High specs, high-ish price, "developers love it" and all the rest. If the PSV didn't manage to beat 3DS with all that, PS4 won't manage to beat Wii U. And since we know nothing about 720 yet, I'm comfortable in predicting that Wii U will sell the most.



Extremely premature to assume any significant external factors are harming the industry at the whole at this point. For handhelds, you may have a point. But the 3DS is selling well and the PSV's low sales can be explained by Sony's relatively weak first party support on the console, diminished Sony presence which helped the PSP, and the lack of some random big game to propel the system ( like Monster Hunter on PSP). These factors would cause any console to have low sales, so what reasoning are you applying to form the conclusion that there's an external factor at work?

Wii U also has its problem. It has one big game that I know of - New Super Mario Bros U and is currently going through a drought of games. Besides, Nintendo consoles have historically been doing worse and worse every gen without any external factors, with the Wii being the only anomaly. And considering the Wii U lacks much of what made the Wii successful, it makes sense that it would mirror the declining sales trend of Nintendo consoles. What reason is there to believe there's an external factor harming the Wii U?

At most, you could argue that there's external factors harming handhelds only (I.e. tablets) and even then only in particular instances looking at the success of the 3DS.