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thismeintiel on 02 January 2014
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Alby_da_Wolf said:

I hope I'm not the only one that thinks that 8th gen has some chances of becoming bigger than 7th, thanks to the fact that its PC architecture could allow it with price drops to eventually meet the growing income of middle classes in emerging markets.
7th gen had one exceptional launch and first year, Wii and two botched ones, PS3 and XB360, 8th gen has got up until now one good but not impressive launch followed by a botched first year, Wii U, one exceptional launch, PS4 and one very good launch, XBOne: we must still see the first year of teh "New HD Twins", but up until now we can say 8th gen is initially doing better than 7th for home consoles.

We're talking about home consoles, 3DS has nothing to do with them, it's doing very well, but portable market is a totally different one, and the bad initial performance of PSV prevents us from telling for sure whether the portable console market is doing bad overall due to Sony errors or if it's really dying due to tablet and smartphne market being slowly but inesorably marginalizing it, or maybe just resizing it to a smaller absolute or relative size without ever making it shrink to insignificant size or disappear.

I don't see it expanding.  Most likely it will shrink below Gen 7, but higher than Gen 6 numbers.  Reason being that a lot of the audience that the Wii attracted, the casuals, have left the market.  The core gamers chose the 360 and PS3 (with many being multi-console owners), with some going for the Wii (mostly Nintendo fans).  The casuals leaving the market can be illustrated in the poor performance of the Wii U.  It's the cheapest, like the Wii.  It has a "gimmicky" controller, like the Wii U.  And it has more games that appeal to the casual crowd, like the Wii. 

Now, moving onto the core.  I think that the noticeable decline in Xbox One demand so close to launch means that most are going to go with the PS4 this gen, seeing as MS has lost all the advatages it had last gen.  They launched within weeks of each other, not a year or more earlier, like the 360.  The One isn't $200 cheaper than the PS4, like the 360, it is now $100 more expensive.  And while the 360 was slightly less powerful than the PS3, it really only showed in exclusives and barely in a few multiplats.  This time around, there is a very noticable difference in the power of each machine, probably the largest seen between the 1st and 2nd most powerful consoles in a gen.  A difference that will only become more noticeable in the coming years.

In the end, I see PS4 ending somewhere between the PS1 and PS2 (~115M-120M.)  The One somewhere between Xbox and 360 (50M-55M.)  And the Wii U doing slightly above N64 (35M-40M.)