2017 is not ps4's peak year!

[DonFerrari]

Shadow1980 said:
For hardware? Possible, but unlikely. While we haven't gotten the official 2017 year-end sales total yet from Sony, it's probably at no less than 74M units. At this point, Sony is running out of new customers to sell the PS4 to. No other system has ever sold this much prior to peaking.

Also, there is no reason to think that a $199 PS4 will necessarily sell better than a $299 PS4. Eventually, price cuts stop resulting in growth. At best, they may provide a modest, very short-term boost but don't negate the overall downward trend in sales. The PS2 sold better at $199 than it ever did at any lower price. In fact, it was selling better at its original $299 price than it did at $179 or $149. The PS3 was selling better at $299 than it did at $249. We see this with other non-PlayStation systems as well. They all eventually reach a "sweet spot" price at which they do the best, and all subsequent price cuts fail to replicate the same effect. Price cuts yield diminishing returns after a certain point.

As for software, many years of hardware sales figures demonstrate that individual games are at best a very short-term boost, usually helping sales for a month at best. And very, very few games have demonstrated their capacity for moving hardware. There is no evidence that simply having a good games lineup in a given year will help a system sell better than any other year. There's no reason to think that a lineup including God of War, Spider-Man, the SotC remake, Detroit, Monster Hunter World, Kingdom Hearts III, RDR2, Far Cry 5, and Soulcalibur VI, despite how solid it is, will produce better sales than the equally strong lineups seen in past years.

The two general rules for software as they pertain to hardware sales are A) having a strong lineup, especially from third parties, is important for a system's overall health, and B) individual games only help in the short term, and even then very few move any measurable amount of hardware. The PS4 was already going to do well in the first category, having a solid selection of exclusives and the full support of all the major third parties. As for the second, the biggest system-seller the PS4 has had to date was the first Destiny game. Nothing else comes even remotely close, at least in the West.

Could the PS4 sell better this year than it did last year? Sure. I cannot rule out that possibility. But I don't think it's a given, and in fact I think it's unlikely.

I'm inclined to agree with you.

My dear number cruncher... could you please put a graph for the aligned sales (date of first release and aligned per region option) for PS2, Wii and PS4?