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S.Peelman on 16 May 2013
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Lawlight said:
Conegamer said:

Well yeah, exactly. Playstation had its time in the spotlight in the PS1/PS2 era, and it just decimated the competition (so Sega, Microsoft and Nintendo all looked to be doing poorly in comparison), but when you compare the other Nintendo consoles, you see that they're always the best selling console, before the Sony era that is. So you can only judge success on how you do relatively to other people. So doing 70mil this gen would be considered "poor", but doing that a decade ago would be a great success. 

As such, only the Gamecube underperformed, and the N64 was right on the verge.

Well, if you want to compare within gens, the N64 sold less than 30% of what the PS sold so it's safe to say it underperformed.

The Wii did well thanks to the casuals (it'll still finish 2nd this gen though).

I just have to say this, without mingling into the rest of the discussion; this is a common misconception.

People practically always ignore, or forget, that the PS1 and PS2 were sold for two generations while all other consoles are on the shelves for only one. When the 5th gen ended, the first Playstation was at 70m sold units. The PSOne which was on sale during the 6th gen accounted for the other 30m. The N64 however was discontinued pretty much immediately after the GameCube was released.

In reality, the N64 put up a better fight then the numbers tell today. In reality, the gen ended 70-33 (and like 10m for the Saturn) , not 102-33. Sure, still a loss for Nintendo, but certainly not the massacre some make it out to be.

The GameCube has a similar story, being discontinued almost immediately after the Wii was released while the PS2 sold an additional 50m units in the generation that followed. Too bad for the GameCube though, this was still a massacre no matter how you look at it .