My guess is 6 years, the landscape of the industry has changed to much in the last three years (during which we have seen a massive decline in sales of the previous gen, of course in part because of the length on gen7) and is now changng even faster. Sony has already started their transition with PS Now, a project that in a few years time could mean that a gamer doesn´t have to buy a PS4 in order to play their games, if they can make it possible on multiple devices. The bizzare thing is that 6 years would still put it up there with the more common time for a generation to last, it´s just that last gen was so long.

And people said thatg it sold faster than Wii, and now i has been passed. You are absolutely right, it has sold better than PS2 during the same timeframe. Sony shipped 1,41M PS2´s in it´s first fiscial year. After tat, shipmets for the four folloing years were:

9,20M

18,07M

22,52

20,1M

Do you think PS4 will ever be able to match the sales from year three and going forward?

PS2 had a HUGE selling point in their affordable DVD drive. Wii had a HUGE selling point in motion gaming. This generation is.... offering better console techwise than the last, and you think this will help push PS4 past Wii?

you think that because you are wrong.

That's some pretty silly logic.

The PS3 and Xbox 360 were engineering marvels of their time, ahead of PCs even for a few months; the Wii was a marvel as well for other lesser reasons. Factoring in how much people are willing to play their ps3/360 instead of getting a next gen consoles compared to how quickly people bought the 360/ps3 when they first came out, it's pretty obvious none of these console will reach 100 million..

What's changed from the last generation console launch: Steam, Steam-boxes, buildable PCs that cost as much as these "next gen" gaming consoles, the WiiU, continued support for the previous generations secondary functions that didn't exist even when the 360/ps3 were initially released..

Also, people bought a ps3 because it was only $150 more than a bluray player at the time... think about that.

Thinking to the future, Virtual Reality.. We need 4k resolution at least to make a decent looking oculus game, please tell me right now you think the ps4 can push 8 million pixels... I'd love to hear someone say that.

I think the next gen starts in 2020. Which means this gen will last for 7yrs. On the 6th year we will start hearing or seeing stuff about the 9th gen consoles though. Maybe even nintendo releases early again and come out that year with sony and MS to follow. So in a way I agree with you and don't too. The decline in sales of the previous gen has nothing to do with an industry changing. Console sales can't increase forever, sooner or later they will reach a saturation point and software sales still remained strong. GTA5 sold over 30M copies afterall.

Funny thing about PSnow, is that if its used the way you think sony would use it, basically allowing you to play PS4 games even if you don't have a PS4 (which I don't think they would do) it would actually lenghten the life span of the PS4 not shorten it. Cause it basically means that as long as you are willing to stream and can, all you need is to buy a PStv for $99.

Wait what? No PS platform has had a start as good as the PS4. 

Too true. It gets so much easier to own people in sales threads as each year passes. Wouldnt mind a oap part of the forum lol 

I hate how this site has gimped all the sales data and analysis tools. If this site still had half the tools it used do then we probably would not be gettig so many silly predictions. I always prefer when people use numbers and reasoning behind it. ala how you, crazzyman, me and many others used to do it. If we were wrong oh well, we always had a solid basis for our arguments. 

What point are you even trying to make here? That PCs are going to take significant amount of sales away from consoles? If that's it then I can immediately tell you, that that's not going to be the case.

DVDs were affordable by year 3 of the PS2s life cycle (and as ubiquitous as video streaming services today), so by that point the PS2 was a pretty expensive DVD player if you wanted a primary DVD player. The whole DVD selling point only really helped push the console for the first year or two. By year 3, even myself as a poor 18yr old student had access to 3 pieces of electronic equipment that could play DVDs. 

The strange thing is you're right in that PS4 doesn't have a truly unique selling point. Only a few major exclusives, upper-mid level PC tech, streaming services similar to the competition and it's not even the cheapest console on the market. Yet it has still sold a ridiculous number of units.

Going forward, if Sony did nothing to rectify this then the sales would drop, but we know they have things in the works. We've yet to see the impact of VR or the release of major next-gen exclusives. And as is the course with consoles, Sony will have unannounced projects and will release hardware/software to expand on the consoles capabilities thereby extending the lifetime sales of the console (as will Nintendo and Microsoft).

Now, will it push past Wii.. yes I think it will, for the simple reason that Nintendo pre-maturely stopped Wii software support. The Wii could have sold so much more than it did, but sales fell off the proverbial cliff after year 4 due to a lack of support. I don't see that happening with PS4. Why? Well, GT7 probably won't come out until year 4 anyway

Mostly  because it was a cheap mid-tier DVD player when those things were still fairly new to the mass market.

They were playing with the DVD player.