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Soundwave on 24 September 2015
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foxtail said:

Soundwave said:

For sales they are the most consistent console seller by a country mile. No one else has consistently sold consoles like them ... Nintendo, Sega, Microsoft are all over the place generation to generation. 

The market has grown a lot since the NES so generation to generation comparisons going too far back are not really useful.

Here's around how big the market was with the cumulation of the top 3 consoles of each gen:

NES gen the market was around ----- 80M (79% NES)

SNES gen the market was around --- 100M (50% SNES)

PS1 gen the market was around ----- 145M (71% PS1)

PS2 gen the market was around ----- 200M (77% PS2)

Wii gen the market was around ------ 270M (31% PS3)

From the PS2 to the PS3 Sony had one of the largest gen to gen drops in console market share in history.  I think only Atari had a bigger drop from one gen to the next gen.

The PS3 sold a lot  (so too did the X360), but with the massive drop in market share and the massive monetary losses, the PS3 was not really consistent with its predecessors.


Just from a market appeal perspective though, I can tell you Microsoft, Nintendo, Sega, and Atari would *love* for 90+ million sold through to be a "bad generation". When you can sell that many systems even at your worst ... you are doing something right. 

Nintendo is barely going to get to 15 million Wii Us, Sega couldn't get past 10 million Saturns or Dreamcasts, Microsoft's lower end is 24 mill with the first XBox.