In addition to all that, I will just say it again. The only people in any kind of trouble here is Nintendo. Cause they are losing on both fronts. Handheld sales are declining as smartphone sales clime and not only do they not make phones, they don't publish games in that sector. And they are losing in the home console space mostly due to their flawed busines model that they have insited on sticking to even after its massive failure in the 6th gen. They lucked out with the wii, but somehow, shocking so I might add, they failed to see why and released something like the WiiU.

Aha!  I found it!

http://www.neogaf.com/forum/showthread.php?p=101260277#post101260277

Posted by "Aquamarine", the same person who did those Nintendo charts.  Who is this Aquamarine?  Are they an industry insider or something?

Sorry if I'm straying too far from the topic here.  I'm just trying to find out if these kinds of figures (specifically generations five and six) are publicly available anywhere.

Fair enough. Just to be clear, I never said this gen will sell more home consoles overall than last gen (even if I hope it would) I expect this gen to sell around 200-210+M homes consoles. On a hardware level that is "less" than last year but on a business level that is better than last gen. All this cause there isn't a casual buffer in the wii to push hardware sales. But its ok, I too have grwon wary of this argument. So agreing to disagree is fine by me :), sorry if I riled you up, its the internetz, a lot can get lost in translation.

Oh you have no idea, I can't make up my mind what is wrong with nintendo. Naivety, traditionalism, stubornness, living under a rock..... combination of everything??????

Every single generation since after the SNES they have almost deliberately gone and looked for a way to bibically mess something up. And unfortunately for them, even though the wii was a "seemingly" big success, it pretty much sealed their fate for this generation. Because now nintendo's core gamer audience is practically non existant.

The Dreamcast failed as a platform and was culled after less time on the market and with mor sales than the WiiU as it stands. I mean by the end of this year, after two years on the market, the WiiU may not have even broken past 10M consoles sold in total. And its buffer platform, the 3DS is sufferring the stiffest competition from mobile that it has ever faced.... and its losing there too. Especially when you consider that these days parents can just buy their kids a $150 5" android phone that wouldn't only play games but at least let them be able to reach them (or track them lol)

I am not focusing solely on this gen, but the last gen as well. Console sales have dropped of as a whole in the last 3-4 years which obviously is related to how long the last gen as but als because the landscape for gaming has changed dramatically. We have already seen this happen in Japan. If the market fo traditional home consoles shrink, we might see more developers migrate to tablets/smartphone. This will affect everyone if they don't adapt.

The real question remains is should nintendo drop the hardware and focus on games, nintendo created the console to have people buy their games and being able to play them at home. Yes, they made a lot of money on selling hardware, but it's peanuts when comparing it with their software revenue

1. Yes, console sales peaked in 2011 and has dropped slightly every since then till 2013. But as you said that is due to how long las gen was, in addition to that though its also due to how long prices remained high last gen. As we speak, a PS3 still cost around $250, a whopping 8yrs later!! 5yrs into the life of the PS2, you could get a brand new PS2 for less than $120. I will touch your japan point in my next point.
2. There are a myriad of reason that cause that migration. Primarily though, its because of HD development costs. And this toes directly to the japanese market today mostly in part due to the japanese publisher busines model.Console sales in japan are dropping off a cliff  because there are increasingly fewer japanese centric console games to play. Its really that simple. The real problem is that the typical japanese publisher doesn't think like the western publisher. They don't want to just make games and hope that people will buy the consoles to play them, the want people to have already bought the console to gurantee the sales of their game. The chicken and the egg. The japanese consumer, want there to be games worth playing (naturally) to warrant them buying the console. Quite a conundrum, but thats whats happenning over there.

A way to look at all this, is that there will always be a place for the dedicated console hardware market. For too many reasons than I have the strenght to get into now. But I will give you a scenario.

Tablets/smartphones by their very nature are limited to one primary input mechanism; touch. That is a very big limitation to the depth of games that can be effectively supported on the platform. Just imagine playing Tekken/COD/WD/Uncharted....etc on a tablet or even worse, a phone. But hey, you could always just pair a controller to it right? Of course you can, but now you are carrying your tablet and controller around. Ok, to mitigate this problem you decide to only play with your controller at home, which also means that you can only play like 80% of your games they way they are designed to be played at home. While doing that, why don't I hook the tablet/phone to my 60" Tv so I could chill on the couch and play the game with my controller? Hell I dont even need wires, I can just beam the feed to my TV. So you do that since you are at home already.........

See whats happenning here?

Yes, and i believe we will see a future in  few years where our tablet also function as our desktop and home console. What I am talking about is that the traditional home console in the form of a dedicated device like X1 and PS4 is loosing ground fast, but that it isn't necessarily bad. I already use my surface as a desktop and tablet, s if MS would offer me to stream the entire X1 experience through the Surface, I would sell my console and go for that instead.

...I'm sorry?

Now you are talking about a completely new can of worms. Streaming. For the most part I agree with you. But understanding what goes into making that work will give you an idea of how far off it is. You are basically talking about gaming as a service. I use my surface a my  primary PC too, even though I have a much more power dedicated PC. So I understand where you are coming from. But lets break this down.

Game streaming doesn't just automagically happen. If you want a streamed game to have PS4 level graphic fidelity, then you basically should have PS4 level hardware somewhere that runs that game. Now if you want to provide a stream for lets say, 30M people simultaneously, taking into account that they could all be playing 50 different games, you literally have to have 30M dedicated PS4 level hardware hubs to run the games for those 30M people. If your audience is 100M large, then thats 100M PS4s. Difference being that these PS4s aren't in your home, you aren't paying for it. They are in a massive server room somewhere.

This brings us to the next part, they will still sell you dedicated hardware. Much simpler on their part compared to what they have to do now from the end consumer perspective. What they will seel you is a small box that allows you connect your controllers or what not. Most importantly though, this box will have extremely cutting egde video processing hardware to process and playback in realtime what may heavily compressed 1080p/4k streams. At 60fps. But thats not really a problem, such a box probably wouldn't cost more than $100. This hardware however wouldn't be something that could just be in every tablet/tv or PC cause its dedicated hardware built to handle codec that nothing else needs to deal with on its level. You can't just use traditional streaming methods. Long story....

But now the real problem, how would such a model work as a business. Lets say MS sells you and XBO for $400. And it cost them $400 to make and ship it to you, they have broken even the second you buy the console. If they make say 100M consoles. Thats $40B right there. But its ok cause they sell all those consoles and start making money from the games. But who pays for the $40B worth of hardware that is in the server room to stream games to a 100M people? And that is not including the additional $100 box they still have to make and sell  to you so you can recieve and process the stream. It emans right off the bat, there is a $400 loss they are taking everytime someone buys that $100 box. 

An easy fix, or actually the only fix... would be something that most would not like. Start charging a subscription fee. And I am not talking about $50/yr. Doing that would take them 8yrs to make back that $400 per user investment. No, they will have to charge around $40/month. Now after paying 440/month do you think gamers will still want to spend $60/game? That they never own and can only stream? No. So that would mean that the games available become part of the service too, which will mean that you won't even be paying $40/month but more like $80/month. 

Then now imagine how they will feel when in say 8yrs they have to spend god knows how much more to upgrade their entire server. Streaming games sound really good on paper. But the business of it is just a disaster all round because of how hardware dependent games are. Think of it this way, in 10 yrs MS tells you to buy a small $50 box or better yet, download an app to your phone or tablet that will let you connect it to your TV so you can play games from XBL, but you will have to pay $80 every month to do so and you don't own any of these games. Sony, tells you that you can buy hardware for $400 that will have IQ that is much higher than what XBL servers can give you and you don't pay $80/month... you just buy your games. Which do you think you would do?