October 2017 NPD Thread! Switch #1

[DonFerrari]

Shadow1980 said:

DonFerrari said:

I like companies going against it other and fighting for our money...

But on competition side no gen had it as close as last considering not only PS3 and X360 but also end numbers with Wii (also PSP doing good against DS). But perhaps since we are older we don't get the same vibe we had almost 30 years ago.

Last gen was an odd one. The Wii smoked everyone at the start of the gen, but dropped quickly, coming in second in both the U.S. & Europe despite winning the gen in global sales. The PS3 & 360 ended up with similar lifetime numbers by pure coincidence. The PS3 actually sold at a faster rate globally than the 360, but launched a year behind. Also, there were significant regional differences. In the U.S., the 360 dominated the PS3 for most of the gen, though there were two periods where they were close in monthly sales (Jan.-Aug. 2008, and Sept. 2009 - May 2010). In Europe the PS3 dominated the 360 on the continent while the UK was similar to the U.S. In Japan the 360 was largely ignored, plus the overall home console market in Japan declined and the PS3 sold half what the PS2 did. Neither the PS3 nor 360 were close in any one region. The math just happened to work out with the PS3 just barely surpassing the 360 by the end of the generation.

But the 16-bit war was fought only in one region: North America. The SNES and Genesis had a constant back-and-forth, and remained almost tied in non-aligned LTD sales:

The SNES dominated Japan, and the Mega Drive won in Europe by a comfortable margin (though the console market in Europe was still very small then). But the 16-bit Wars in the U.S. was by far the closet contest ever, and it was a genuine contest, not a coincidental close battle driven by fluke math.

On that I can't disagree with you.

And this is one of the points I make to people over here that SNES wasn't the dominating console with a easy win. That in fact in USA Genesis was ahead until the new gen kicked in.

Curiously enough that would also be the last Nintendo home console to have a smooth drop after peak