Shadow1980 said:
the_dengle said:
That is a very optimistic perspective for all three consoles. Glad to see somebody thinks they can all do well.
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Well, there has been fairly rapid growth in console sales over the decades:
And that seventh-gen tally is likely going to get to around 290-300 million at this rate. While there are always limits to growth, there's no reason to think the eighth generation won't be even bigger than the seventh. The one biggest obstacle to growth will be Japan, which unlike the other major regions has not been buying home consoles at an accelerated rate. Here's how North America and Japan compare:
It's possible that handhelds cannibalized a good chunk of the sales of home consoles in Japan. The DS sold 33 million units there, while the PSP sold 19 million units. That's a total of 52 million handhelds vs. about 24 million home systems. Meanwhile, the GBA only sold 17 million units. However, handhelds do fill a different niche from home consoles, so its impossible to know how much if any sales of them cannibalize console sales. The DS was ridiculously popular in the U.S. & Canada as well, with 60 million units sold, and the PSP did decently as well with 17 million units sold, but those combined 77 million handhelds sold didn't prevent the seventh generation from being much bigger than the sixth in America. Whatever the cause is, there was a big decline in Japan. Will they rebound? Will they stay the same? Will they continue to shrink? The Wii U will of course not do anywhere near as well as the the Wii, and might get to around N64 levels at best in Japan, and the XBO will probably still struggle to get to the 2 million mark. That leaves the PS4 to be the dominant system there, but given the atypical nature of the Japanese market, there's no way of knowing for sure how well it will do. The PS3 is at around 9.5 million right now in Japan, and might add another 1 to 2 million to the LTD total by 2016. I think the PS4 will do a good bit better than that. There also might be less competition from handhelds this time (assuming they're even competition in the first place). While the 3DS has been selling like hotcakes, with over 12 million units sold in Japan, that's less than what the DS had sold by this point after its launch. The Vita also hasn't been doing nearly as well as its predecessor, with less than 2 million units out of some 5+ million worldwide. If the Wii U does 6 million in Japan and the XBO 2 million, then for the eighth generation to match the seventh, the PS4 would have to sell 16 million units. If it sells as well as the PS1 or PS2 and the Wii U and XBO as well as I think, that might drive the eighth-gen total to around 30 million, which would be a decent rebound.
In any case, given the unpredictable nature of the Japanese market, when I made my estimates in my previous post, I was actually assuming modest growth of less than 15% worldwide, versus the normal 40+%. Even Microsoft is projecting less-than-normal growth: they're estimating 385 eighth-gen systems, a 28% jump over an estimated 300 million seventh-gen consoles. Here's what the first chart in this post might look like by 2023 if my projections pan out:
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