The hardcore console market seems to be shrinking

[DonFerrari]

CrazyGamer2017 said:

Lenny93 said:

PS2 + OG Xbox = 182.33 Million.

PS3 + 360 = 173.21 Million.

PS4 + One projected sells = 164 million, 48 million for Xbox one and 116 million for PS4.

Or do you think that these 2 will eventually match or surpass the previous generation before them?

Well first, every single person that purchases a console is not a hard-core gamer. A lot of people, arguably the majority of gamers are casuals in this day and age, regardless of the system they play on. Of all the people I know and with all the PC's and consoles they have put together, easily 80% of their hardware is used for Candy Crush, the Sims and other such casual software.

Hard-core gamers used to be the majority, long long ago back when video gaming was a thing for nerds. Which means they were the majority of a niche hobby. The real growth in video games consumption roughly since the mid 1990's is mostly of casuals. And today we are drowning in a sea of casuals. The mobile market is absolutely huge, close to a couple billion people playing casually.

If anything I'd say we hard-core gamers are growing but at a much slower pace than the casuals so proportionally we are shrinking and becoming irrelevant. I can only hope that there will be enough of us to sustain and make the creation of good hard-core games a profitable market for video games publishers for many years to come but with the seemingly endless growth of casuals that don't care about quality, intrusive loot-boxes, pay-to-win mechanics etc, I am not sure how we (hard-core gamers) even have a future. Time will tell.

I can't consider who buy less than 2 games a year (all platforms considered) to be hardcore. And that is more than what the average on the system (5 years and ratio is about 10 SW per HW).

Most of us in VGC (even if needing to wait for severe deals and the like) probably buy over one game per month.