Sony CEO Kenichiro Yoshida calls console gaming niche

[mjk45]

Wyrdness said:

mjk45 said:

The thing is he didn't compare it to the worlds population and anyway it's silly to use our 7 billion population since just about everything is marginal when that's your comparison point, plus niche is a specialist segment of a mainstream enterprise and where did you pull that 120m from?.

Everything is marginal compared to it but we get a better idea of where industries stand when using it, console gaming as industry is dwarfed by other industries when everything is compared to it as other industries touch a much larger percent regardless so yes that makes it niche, that 120m is an estimated average of total platforms moved per gen while factoring overlap of userbases the actual number is likely smaller when all factors are taken into account and looked in to.

 People are misusing the term, niche is used to describe a specialised segment of a mainstream market, also Yoshida was talking about console gaming and like Rol pointed out it accounts for 25 % of the total games market , it was a poor choice of word, he obviously was trying to demonstrate that the deal for Sony impacts a lot of divisions not just the gaming division,but instead he decided to play down the gaming division rather than playup the plan.

Now in regards to the 120m,if you total up Sony Nintendo and Xbox consoles it comes to around double that number and the percentage that own multiple units is most likely offset by figures that show higher  active user numbers,still this is irrelevant since console gaming isn't a specialised segment of itself .