I stand corrected.

Wii - 100.3 Million as of September

360 - 80 Million as of October

PS3 - 80 Million as of November

PS3 is still behind. It only just reached the 360 sales total of 1 Month ago. Right now, the PS3 is still in dead last 3rd place. It hasnt won the console war.

The generation is going to end when the PS4 and Xbox One launches. There is no need to extend the generation beyond it's limits. The PS360 had a good run and sold a lot, but the PS3 is far from the winner!

Not necessarily.  It could also mean, as I implied, that a console maker increased their market share or sales the most.  That's just a difficult thing to say in a short statement and I didn't want that one factor stretched out much further than it already is...so 'generation to generation' it became.

The idea that just because a console is still on the market in some parts of the world, that the generation it is from is somehow "still going", is both wishful fanboy thinking on anyone's part, and also completely absurd.

Just because the Atari 2600 was still available when the Master System and NES were out, doesn't mean that the second gen of consoles was still going. The 2600 wasn't officially discountinued until 1992. That doesn't mean it wasn't already long dead by then. The NES lasted a good 10 years, just in NA alone, not being discontinued until 1995. In Japan, the Famicom was still available at retail until 2003 for christ's sake. But that does not mean that even when the NES was still going strong in 1993 and 1994, that it's generation wasn't already long over, and that we were knee deep in the 16-bit fourth generation of consoles.

It has been pretty firmly established long before now, that a new generation starts, and the old one closes, when new consoles start coming out. You could argue that when one system has a big head-start, like the Xbox 360 or the Wii U, that the previous gen is still winding down. But with the Wii U out, and the PS4 and Xbox One almost on the market, yes, the seventh gen is now over, dead, finito. Does that those consoles won't still sell for some time, get a few more games, etc.? Of course not. But it's still over, and the Wii won the genration by a healthy margin. End of story.

It didn´t !

It may have won gamers´ goodwill, but it didn´t win by any normal standard

You can look at the term "winning a generation" from two different perspectives: Market share and profits.

The PS3 was a financial flop for Sony and the PS3 lost the dominative marketshare the predecessors enjoyed.

It is a great console, but no sane person would call that "winning"!

I'll say that the PS3 made what many would have considered to be an impossible recovery/turnaround back in 2007-2008 when there were some pretty hilarious/hopeful predictions that Sony would be forced to leave the console business due to the failure of the PS3. Meanwhile, it was simultaneously predicted that the Wii would become a standard household item with the more optimistic predictions wish/believing Nintendo would eventually sell something in the range of 250 million units.

In terms of marketshare lost, it's a no-brainer when you're starting from something like 80% from the previous generation. Of course, this was for a $299 box that had no legitimate competition at the time. The GC and XB arrived too late to stop the momentum. So even if the PS3 miraculously closed up production with just over 50% of the total 7th gen hardware sales (obviously impossible), it still would have lost a huge percentage of marketshare compared to the PS2.

In terms of monetary losses, not only did Sony manage to debut with a box that cost $600, they topped themselves by losing well over $200 per unit over production cost for the initial models. While those models were in production for less than a year, it still took several years and hardware revisions before Sony was able to make a small profit on each hardware unit sold. This wouldn't have been such an issue had Sony been taking in say 70-80% or even just over 50% of the revenue (for the total console market) being generated through software sales and licensing fees, but this wasn't the case. It was closer to a third at best.

The number of units sold may well be the least important number relative to the above and ironically, this is the number the PS3 has the greatest chance of actually "winning" if it stays in production long enough, given that the current numerical "winner" of the 7th gen is for all intents and purposes done, dead and finished selling any significant number of hardware units.

In terms of positioning, heading into the current generation of consoles, Nintendo managed to kill their lead faster and harder than Sony managed to kill their lead continuing from the PS2. Nintendo literally has 100% of the 8th gen console sales and will likely find itself in last place somewhere between Q4 2013 and Q2 2014. MS managed to leverage itself into the best position with the XB360, only to lose positioning with the reveal of the XB1 between the lesser hardware specs, the higher price and a bunch of the policies MS has since backtracked on due to consumer backlash, leaving Sony in good position with the PS4.

We'll see what happens from here. We've already seen that "winning" a hardware generation means little if this isn't leveraged properly into the next generation with the PS2 to PS3 transition and most likely with the Wii to the Wii-U.

Agreed, makes much more sense consider the gens this way.

But try to explain it to a sony fan...

Cute

I don't claim the thread is flamebait. The article cited is. Because posting an article with a headline that is obviously totally wrong is flamebait. Or in terms of articles posted on sites with advertisement 'clickbait'. The article puts out some true numbers, but none of them justify taht the PS3 won the gen. And it didn't hurt my feelings, otherwise it wouldn't be yawn-worthy.

Why did you attack me, as I stated the obvious? Did that hurt your feelings?

I dont gauge gens by when Nintendo does things. They do their own thing. I thought people would've caught on by now that for the rest of us next gen starts in a week or so.