I agree. Did you see what I said about the PS2? That could possibly be a factor.

Dropping the vita altogether would cause the questioning of Sony's confidence in its own hardware. 

I don't mean now. I mean when this generation is up (If Hand Helds are still needed) they shouldn't make another.

My two cents: I think SW and HW do go hand in hand. But you can't simply churn out 200 crappy games and expect them to move consoles! You need to bring your A-game for that! I think 3DS and Vita recently showed that: with no killer app (like Mario) the system won't sell it self!

I think Nintendo really blew it with the Wii: they droped the ball back in 2010; they didn't release enough relevant games! And, to compete with the HD twins in the Long term the Wii would have needed more power, to cater better to both casuals and hardcore gamers...

Xbox would have won the Hardware sales every year if the HW is directly proportional to Software sales.

That's what the1 said

I agree that they aren't directly proportional, and I'm glad we're finding correlations within the thread. For instance, why Wii HW sales dwindled at the same time as SW support subsided.

No of games, equal casual and hard core gamer focus and quality matters. All of them should co-exist. One alone is not enough to bring the console to glory. PS2 had all of that.

The HW sales cause the # games to inflate or deflate. (demand)

Directly proportional? No.

But obviously the numbers of games (and their percieved quality plus attractiveness for different demographics) does play an important part in demand for a console - games after all are a key reason to buy one at all.

What matters most I'd say is the spread of attractiveness of the games/services on any given console and I think your own charts point to that - plus previous consoles/games performance as well.

Consider say Halo 2 on Xbox - sold hugely yet Xbox itself didn't. This is because the demographic appeal of the Xbox (and by association the spread of attractiveness of its games/services) was actually fairly narrow vs the PS2 which I'd argue had the best spread of attractiveness ever for a home console - with obvious results.

This gen the Wii for quite a while managed something similar - it appealed more overall to more people. But then it's key appeal factors stagnated.

Meanwhile the 360/PS3 really have been kissing cousins practically the whole time - with games/services which have appealed fairly broadly but hampered by region which has curtailed their success to almost identical levels.