Before spring 2014 I think. The PS4 is expected to sell around 3 million this year but I expect them to hit around 4 million once they have the supply issues sorted out in the holidays. I expect the PS4 to sell from 2 to 2.5 million. They'll be able to get another million from japan and sony can manage to solve more supply issues in europe while remaining strong stock in the north american market to get the other million. The WII U is likely to end up at 5.5 million units at best before april if mario kart 8 doesn't launch in late march.

I always wondered where all those "next gen consoles won't have any games for the next year" come from.

Let me give you an excerpt of a list I call "System Sellers of 2014"

Dragon Age: Inquisition
The Evil Within
The Order: 1886
Tom Clancy's The Division
The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt
Wolfenstein: The New Order
Driveclub
Thief
Metal Gear Solid V: Ground Zeroes
Infamous: Second Son
Final Fantasy XIV: A Realm Reborn
Dying Light
Watch Dogs
Destiny

And those are just the bigger titles, there are a bunch of smaller profile games that will at least in quantity sell consoles.

Very few of those games look like "system sellers" to me. If they do in fact turn out to be, then the hardcore are bigger suckers than I believed them to be..

Yup. I fixed up the list and only left the system sellers for the first half of 2014. It's not as amazing as most PS fans make it out to be.

Doesn't mean the PS4 will drop to Wii U levels though. It's a common fallacy that software sells hardware. Certainly great games help, but a well positioned device doesn't need a continual release of system sellers to keep up momentum. The Wii only needed Wii Sports to make it the fastest selling console in history.

By May 2014 both PS4 and X1 will outsell the Wii U.

Spring 2014

Feb-April 2014. Reasons:

1) Japan launch will kick in and add 1-1.5M easily. I think too that Sony will ship more than 5M units and that was only a conservative figure. They probably shipped close to 3M and will be at 4M by years end. They would't go for a Japanese launch with only 1M units for it and the rest of the world.

2) Besides that, it's an easy to manufacture console and they will have plenity of stock. The APU is based on AMDs newer tech that will be in a lot of desktops and notebooks, so the mass production will drop prices and improve yelds. The memory is normal GDDR5 used on GPUs and the rest is pretty common. Both Sony and MS will have massive stocks.

3) Last year they will have by that timeframe InFamous, DriveClub and Deep Down. Watch Dogs will at a month to launch and there will bee the hype for Destiny and Uncharted 4. It will sell like hotcakes.

These 3 are highly anticipated. The preorder numbers for Watch Dogs and Destiny already show that they will sell like crazy. MGS will move units in Japan as usual.

2013 ... no doubt about it.

Sony expect 5m end of March, they'll hit that and more if they can get stock out.

WiiU will be 6m (shipped) end of this year, 500k Q1 (if they're lucky.)

They'll be even by at least September time.

Bear in mind that

1. PS4 sold 2,5 millions this far, and the Holiday period has not even passed.

2. There's 1,8M people on the waiting list just in the US, just at Gamestop

3. For those a tempted by the PS4 but not fan/gamer enough to have rushed on the release, there's another big period coming (especially in Europe and Japan) and this is February.