Is the PS4 Sony's Most Successful Console to Date?

[Illusion]

I can't comment on financial profitability or software sales, but if you gauge success by hardware market dominance then the PS2 is the clear winner by a wide margin in my view. The PS2 basically held 80% of the market share and not only beat but badly demoralized its competition. With the PS4, even if you consider the last generation as being PS4 + XOne + Wii U then the PS4 won about 65% of the market share which is very dominant but still not quite at the level of the PS2. That said, if you look at the last generation as a battle among PS4 + XOne + Switch then the PS4 isn't even going to be the winner in this battle. To make matters worse, the PS4 had its plug pulled on it basically immediately after the PS5 was released which is basically the first time that this ever happened with a Sony console (even the PS3 didn't fade away as quickly as the PS4 has).

Those of us who remember the first half of the PS4's life will remember that it was a very dominant console that maybe wasn't far off of the PS2, but if you look at the second half I am seeing a console that was beaten quite soundly by the Switch as well as being a console that had a rather ungraceful exit from the market. At the end of the day, the gap between the Switch and the PS4 is likely going to be quite a bit larger than that gap between the Wii and PS3 was and that is the number people will look back upon when judging the winner of the last generation.