Hiku said:
Mummelmann said:
100 million Switch sales is extremely optimistic. PS4 is set to have around 50-51 million sales by the end of the year (which is less than I expected as can be seen in my sig, and people said I was being too pessimistic with my predictions), by which time it will have been on the market for over 3 years. The PS2 had a decade long lifespan and several 20 million + selling years, the PS4 is yet to even come close to a 20 million CY and won't have anywhere near as long a life as the PS2 or the PS3, most likely. The market is moving too fast and has branched out and become hinged upon competing on non-gaming features, constant revision and updates and there is no real developer incentive for keeping the 8th gen around as long as the 7th gen, which saw the rise of HD gaming and development tools and method was put in place and losses recovered on all sides by expanding the cycle.
How will the PS4 sell 110 million or more? How much will the PS4 Pro help the PS4 in total, will it lift it into a much higher baseline for 2017? How will it do that and why? The Xbox One has "won" North America three months in a row with the Slim, PS4's own slim didn't help them all that much and even if the PS4 is thrashing the Xbox and Wii U in Japan, it's really not selling impressive numbers at all there, and hasn't for the entire gen, much like the PS3 before it.
If the Xbox One Slim beats the PS4 Slim in North America, there is little reason to think that Scorpio won't beat the Pro in that region and with Japan mostly being irrelevant today, scraping together 110 million or more sales is simply not something I can any of the three doing easily any longer in the modern market. 100 million is not a certainty either, no more so than the PS3 catching the Wii like so many said it would.
110 million sales for the PS4 is very unrealistic, but 100 million sales for the Switch at present is even more so.
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PS2 sold 157m. That's not the closets comparison for PS4. Compare it to PS3 instead. PS3 did 86m. You don't think PS4 will at least do 100m then? I feel that's very likely. And then there's a 10m margain to 110m. Certainly not out of the realm of possibilities imo. While the Japanese market has declined, PS4 is taking a much bigger marketshare in the US than it did with the PS3.
And let's not blow the 3-NPD-in-a-row out of proportion just yet. It's not enough to demonstrate a pattern yet, with people holding off for PS4 Pro, and there being more of a reason for XBO owners to upgrade to XBO S than there is for PS4 owners to upgrade to PS4 Slim. Which may have a limited effect on sales with a burst growth in the initial months, but when it comes to ppl who don't own either console, PS4 and Pro may very well still turn out to be the console of choice in USA. On top of that we don't even know the difference in sales numbers for the past two months I believe? Xbox One outsold PS4 by as little as 5k units during Halo 5 month, for example. If those are the kind of sales differences we've seen for the past few month, then it will take decades for XBO to close the 2m gap in the usa.
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The PS3 had healthy growth every year for about 5 years running, PS4 is looking to be down from around 17.7 million in 2015 to 15-16 million for 2016, that's down about 10-13% yoy in its third CY on the market, it's in many ways the opposite of the PS3. Sure, it may pick up, but with the fast-paced, revisionist market we have today, things go out of style and other things pop in quickly and with little warning. If the PS4 is to sell more than 100 million, and certainly if they want 110 million, they'll need to work for it and probably release several revisions. And there's no way at any rate that the 8th gen will be as long as the 7th gen, so there's also the time factor.
The PS3 had an unusually late peak, with the peak year being just about on par with what the PS4 seems set for selling in 2016, with a slower decline and a longer lifespan, even with the PS4's obviously superior momentum at the beginning, selling 100 million won't be as easy as many seem to think.
Factor in irrelevant Japan and a turn towards an even more partitioned or even seggregated market, and 110 million becomes close to impossible. 50 million, or there about for three years (from launch in Novemeber 2013), three first year of sales, it would need a rather long lifecycle and some fairly small drops yoy to manage 110 million, we're talking good sales for another 5-6 years at least, which seems extremely unlikely.
Hey, I could be wrong as hell, I can see how many would look at the competition (or rather lack thereof) and think that this is easily done, and perhaps it is. But market reality today is not what it was in 2006, or even 2012 for that matter (when the 8th gen started). I guess time will tell.
