It has a fairly large chance of beating the Wii, life time sales. This is PS we're talking about here, Sony systems have good legs and keep selling well after the Gen is over. The PS4 just needs to be pumping out games soon (only 2-3 noteworthy games at the moment) and maintain healthy sales, something the Wii has horribly failed to do. On the chartz the Wii (last time I checked) is selling in last place which isn't good for the former market leader, and is still behind the PS1 and PS2 despite its earlier sales.

TL;DR: Slow and steady wins the race

Wii was a true beast.

The fact that PS4 is even in this conversation is impressive.

Wii was a real monster

false

Well.. 2.5 years in they were talking about not having shortages soon...   Easy to find several articles from March 2009... talking about it..  3 years isn't that far off.

I know that there's a belief that the videogame market has crashed, but the PS4 has been out for 6 months. A bit too early to dismiss the next generation, don't you think?

No dismissal at all. But it's obvious that consoles aren't selling like they used to. Especially in Japan. Wii killed in Japan and WiiU isn't. So what I'm saying is that the drop off in sales from Wii to PS4 isn't really news.

OT: Props on the Nas avatar. Greatest of all time!

I don't really think this generation will be 8 years like the last.. My guess is closer to 5 years. I do NOT think any of the consoles will hit 100 million in 5 years.

Generation 8 Totals:
PS4: 85-95m
X1: 65-75m
WiiU: 40-50m

So.. I don't think we will see the PS4 matching Wii totals.

Come on, don't downplay it. Even PS3 still can pass the Wii. If that happens, the Wii will be behind PS1/2/3. PS4 will outsell the Wii easily. If you get the current PS360 share, add some growing because of the bigger market and considers that PS4 is getting a bigger share than X1 (because Sony is gaining share while MS is losing it), it is simply a giving.

PS consoles usually sells 25% to 33% of their LT numbers after the successor is out, with that logic even PS3 has a chance of passing the Wii. PS4 is more bound to land somewhere between Wii and PS2 numbers.

Despite that, your affirmation that PS4 has to sell more tham the Wii now is simply wrong. Wii tracked ahead of the PS2 for most of it's life, but it ended 60M units short of it. Sony usually does a great job in having consoles with long cicles to attend 3rd word countries and budget contrained people.

Despite gen lenght, tech isn't moving faster now. It is moving slower as we approach memory bandwidth/ transistor size limits. PS1 was a much bigger advance compared to SNES than PS2 were compared to PS1. In a similar way, PS4 isn't an advance bigger than PS3 vs. PS2 even with the extra time. Tech advances at a regular pace following rules like Moore's Law and there isn't shortcuts. A new console in 4 years  would simply look underpowered. The next gen will probably only happen when real time ray tracing becomes a reality and following NVidias roadmap for PC GPUs, we are still 4 years from that, plus the time needed to improve power consumption and price to put in a console, so we can count a good 6 years time to allow a sizeable jump. 9th gen will be all about ray tracing and devs will need a lot of time to adapt to that (since engines will need to be redone from scratch, but there isn't another way to improve graphics).