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Swordmasterman on 15 May 2016
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Shadow1980 said:
ZhugeEX said:

Both

Ah. I see. That actually might make a big difference. I wonder how much of all that decline since 2009 was due to how grossly overinflated the market was last generation. Home consoles sales were arguably way more than they would have been otherwise thanks to the Wii selling well (it was responsible for about 75% of all gen-over-gen console sales growth), and the handheld market shattered expectations, with the DS selling more at its peak than any hardware platform ever and the PSP being the first non-Nintendo handheld to perform well (the GBA also overperformed in the U.S. relative to Europe and Japan). The Wii U's struggles, the inability of the 3DS to replicate the DS's success (a likely insurmountable task even ignoring other factors), and the utter failure of the Vita have caused a big reduction in the overall size of the hardware market from its peak in 2008 (the PS4 & XBO are so far performing quite well in combined sales compared to their predecessors, as shown in my usual charts in these threads). A combination of the shrinkage of the handheld market, Nintendo's troubles with the Wii U, and the general dynamics of the console cycle could be a major contributing factor in the decline of software sales.


Of course, there's also fewer publishers and fewer games, but there's still some ambiguities. How many of those publishers were drawn in by the seventh-gen bubble and left when that bubble popped, how many were those were simply unable to deal with the financial realities of modern AAA development, and how many of those were simply gobbled up by other companies? As for the number of games published, how many of those were themselves a symptom of the hardware sales glut (esp. for handhelds) and how many were due to the higher number of publishers (a smaller amount of big companies could in principle publish as many titles as a bunch of smaller developers)? Handhelds especially were mostly exclusives, and the DS and PSP brought in a ton of unique titles, plus the lower costs of development meant extant publishers could theoretically release more titles for their buck than they could for home systems, especially for the 360 & PS3.

Unfortunately, without a more detailed breakdown going back further than 2009 (preferably back to 2000, if not earlier) as well as the software sales & number of titles split between handhelds and consoles, it'll be hard to clarify all the causal factors at work here.

So the home console market did nearly the same in 2014 and 2015 on USA ?.