Thast the sad state of gamers today. Mostly just a sensationalist bunch of people and something that even filters through the gaming media. Second I walked into this thread I knew it was another "doom thread", but the secodn you give them the real facts they all just quivver away until the next time they can think up or twist some other metric (or God forbid someone doesn't sell as much as they did the month before) then another one of these wil pop up.

I applaud the work put into making the OP, but the focus or what message he went on to convey and stir was skewed at best.

Its low due to Gen transitions, it always got low before a new gen. It was especially low for the years before Gen 8 due to 7 being as long as it was

Seriously? 

Vita doing well outside of Japan? What?

I'm convinced the gaming industry is as good as ever. Nothing is wrong. There's definitely no decline.

Nice thread. However there are many problems with these facts.

1. Handhelds are giving way to mobile. Mobile is taking over and technically revenue wise the gaming industry is still strong with handheld+mobile.

2. As with handhelds the consoles are also changing. Instead of getting a $250 console at launch as your popular console, we now have a $400 and $500 console with higher prices in other countries. If the console manufacturers were to release new consoles that were cheaper then the amount of units would probably be higher but revenue would be about the same.

3. We are in transition phase, and along with handhelds giving way to mobile old records will be broken.

Who knows what will happen in the future??? I am sure you will be able to figure it out since you can predict the future pretty easily.

Edit: Also I fully believe this gen will be shorter then last gen by 1-3 years. Which will definitely make comparisons.... difficult.

The bolded/underlined is very true.  The OP is focusing on combined shipments of each company.  Once the 360 is dropped, and the One is on its own, those numbers will look horrible.  And you did catch a typo.  I meant isn't.  I'll fix that, now.

Sonys will go up from last year, not sure about the other 2 companies.

2008 was a redonkulous year for hardware sales. I seriously doubt we'll ever see anything like that again anytime soon, if ever.

Do we have separate charts for handhelds vs consoles?

EDIT: I ask this because my first inclination is to say that the smartphone market is affecting handhelds.

This could be a really good time to ensure the next handhelds are also phones.

Seems like the DS + Wii peak for Nintendo and the PSP peak for Sony. Now the casual and handheld markets are gone.

Sales are back to pre-DS numbers but similar to the PS1-PS2 transition and not too far off the PS2-Xbox 360 one. We need a few more years before confirming there is a pattern there.

I think home consoles (outside the mentioned casual market) are fine, and I think all three home consoles will sell more next year than this one, which is the normal pattern.