foxtail said:
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. |
changes in marketshare are representitive more on the overall strength of the options available than the performance of the console itself.
The wii sold exceptionally well, as did the PS3 despite them getting to market later than the 360, so if anything gen 7 is just an anomaly where everyone sold well and shared the potential userbase more or less equally.
If any other gen contained three platforms that all did just as similarly well as each other then we would see the trend occur more often, but in previous generations the console that pulled ahead out of the gate usually solidified that lead, the difference for gen 7 was the underdog shot under the gate before the rest of the gates opened, unsettling the ebb and flow of the race.
If the 360 did not release, or released the same time as the wii and ps3, we would likely be sitting right now discussing 120-130m sales for wii and ps3 and 50-60m sales for xbox 360, and we would STILL be looking at anomalous data because the wii performance is grounded upon hitting a trend in the bullseye and riding that trend until dissapation.
Thus using gen7 data to establish any norms is not going to really work.
