25% Marketshare or above

20 million. For example... GameCube sold 22 million and since the software sales were great... they made profit. The GameCube wasn't a failure... it didn't die until a while. late 2001-early 2007

Handhelds 60 million.
Home consoles 35.

But the N64 and GC sold less than that and still made a good profit. XBox on the other hand...

I would guess around 30 million, that would be enough to keep interest high from 3rd parties and have alot of games sell in the 5-10 million range, thus making good profit.

Enough to post a profit on total costs including R&D as well as building momentum for a potential successor to have a chance to experience success.

How much a console actually sells is irrelevant. Whats important is its market share is in relation to the other competitors in its space. I would add that this may seem a little tricky to measure for the PS4/XB1 vs the WiiU cause a majority of the games you find on the PS4/XB1 neevr make it to the wiiU. 

But Ideally we should be looking at the total number of consoles being sold in the home console space. A console in a 3 console race should have at least 33.3% ideally. Anything less than 20% could be considered a failure.

40 million.

if it breaks even its not a failure because its not only about money but about reputation and about establishing your product etc and about making consumers happy. (fuck the stupid greedy shareholders they are just parasites)

The whole industry and the internet community has a flawed opinion on what a failure is.

E.g. Lets say you are RockstarGames you do NOT want to make GTA5 on WiiU because you are not sure if it will be as successful as on PS3 or 360.

This is a valid point BUT your IP is so huge it will sell and it will 100% break even. But deciding against it is a mistake because there is not only short term profit but also long term profit. You will establish your IP and then the next instlallment (as long as the quality is there) will sell even better. If you act as Activision did on the other hand with delaying the most important game in the series (modern warfare1 that made it a huge success) for over a year and then another installment completely skips the Nintendo platform then you just sabotaged your own effort in establishing your IP.



If you dont lose money on something and you make people happy it was def worth it and was not a failure. The Vita for example is also not a failure because it is profitable. It might not sell that much but the device does have its fanbase and thats what counts. I mean seriously people bash a console they have no interest in and say it fails but why do they care about it? Its like saying a movie was shit and failed when it was in italian and you just understand english it was clearly not ment for you so your opinion is irrelevant.

I also think its pretty funny that alof of companies that have games that sell 1-5m at max dare to say a system that sells 5-10m is a failure.
I mean there is more than 3x as many people that are willing to pay 3-6x the money for that "failing system" than there are people that want to buy the devs 60 dollar game. So whose product is a failure now huh?

There is no set number. It's all about the money, so turning a profit makes the venture a success. This goes for consoles, games, movies, television series, T shirts, websites, every other product under the sun.

You might see people call things failures for many reasons (expectations, one brand having a bigger marketshare then the other, someone is just a bigger fan of something else instead, etc), but if they are profitable that's all that matters.