Weekly global 21 June: XBOX ONE increase again

[binary solo]

Shadow1980 said:

I see a lot of gloom and doom over everything being under 100k, so I thought I'd try to give some perspective to the situation. Here's generation-over-generation sales in North America from the 8-bit era to the seventh generation:

Now here's combined annual sales in the U.S. from 1995 to 2013, as well as my personal projections for this year and next year (next year's assume a 50% year-over-year increase in PS4 and XBO sales from my 2014 estimate, a decrease of about 15% in YoY Wii U sales, and a 50% YoY drop for the 360 and PS3):

(Note: There are no readily available N64 and PS1 sales figures past 2001 despite both systems remaining on the market well past then, so 2002, 2003, and possibly 2004 are likely smaller than they really were)

The market may be "contracting" (in the sense of fewer hardware units being sold, which is distinct from the number of customers) compared to last generation, but there may be no reason to get all gloom-and-doom about it. While I don't think the Wii was driven primarily by "casuals" and non-gamers, I do think it was an anomaly. It was by far the fastest-selling system of all time, and I also believe it resulted in a considerably larger number of multi-system households due to its unique nature and low price relative to the others. With the Wii U failing to replicate that success, the market appears to be correcting back towards a more "normal" cycle. If you'll notice, despite the fact that the sixth generation was considerably larger than the fifth, combined yearly sales of all platforms result in the sixth-gen curve from 2000 to 2005 not being too dissimilar from the one from 1996 to 2000. Had the Wii ended up selling only as well as the GameCube, with each year from 2007 to 2013 averaging only about 25% of what it actually did, we would also have seen a curve with peaks and troughs that don't differ greatly from the two preceding curves. Assuming that A) my projections for 2014 & 2015 are accurate to within 10%, B) 2015 is the peak for the PS4 and XBO (the second full calendar year is the normal peak), C) the ninth generation has a more normal duration (as opposed to the abnormal length of the seventh generation), and D) the PS4 and XBO have decent sales legs, then the cycle in the years from 2013 to circa 2020 may follow a curve more or less like those of the late 90s & early 2000s. Even if the current cycle and the total number of current-gen consoles sold isn't as large as last time, it's still health. Perhaps the market already hit saturation in the early 2000s and is now only growing as a function of population growth and the gradual increase of the average age of gamers.

EDIT: I also forgot to mention that each consecutive trough in the console cycle has been higher than the preceding one. Less than five million consoles were sold in 1995. In 2000 is was about 8 million. In 2005 it was just over 10 million. Last year it was about 11.3 million. The maket actually stays healthier during each subsequent contraction, and it really makes the gloom-and-doom arguments from around 2011 to 2013 when the cycle was on the downwards-trending part sound really ridiculous. Not only did most of them fail to recognize that 2011 and 2012 were respectively the fifth and ninth biggest years since 1995, many failed to notice that there was an actual console cycle to begin with.

I'd rather see you put all that analytical work into an analysis of global sales, because a significant global decline can happen even if the biggest single market is stable. But your data does not really support a prediction of gen on gen stability or growth in the USA.

It is very worth reflecting on the fact that globally PS3+360 (165M) < PS2+Xb (182M) but in the USA PS3+360 (75M) > PS2+Xb (69M). So the world as a whole does not necessarily follow where the USA goes. The global growth from gen 6 to 7 is entirely down to the motion control fad, which primarily occurred on Wii. I think we  may well have seen a contraction from gen 6 to 7 if it hadn't been for that single generation, not to be repeated, flood of casual gamers. So we very well could be headed for a lower sales gen compared to gen 6. It would not surprise me in the least if gen 8 fell short of gen 6's ~200 million benchmark. PS4 will have to carry the generation very hard for the agregate of all 3 to make 200 million, even if GC2 Wii U and Xb one somehow miraculously make it to 50M each.

People are right not to go into a doomsaying panic about a contraction from gen 7. It's obvious this will happen if we use current sales patterns to project out to the 5-year mark, and there is plenty of room beneath 270M for consoles to be able to thrive. But people should be concerned if there is a notable contraction from gen 6. There is a significant chance of this happening. Gen 6 and gen 7 both had phenomena that are highy unlikely to be repeated. And they both lacked the disruptive competition that exists now, though that distruptive competition did start hitting handhelds in the latter part of gen 7.