Respective profit =/= sales winner.

On this site at least, I'm sure 90% us really care about marketshare, its why we compare sales not profit and why VGC has a massive comparative sales chart on the front page. 

Then the Wii is still around 15M units ahead.

Profits are all that matters if you want to declare a company the winner.

This. Although I would also add brand power.

Yeah, sorry. Xbone was the most expensive.

Yeah, PS2 had gen 6 on lock down due to the brand, without brand power PS3 would have been the original X1 and N64 would have been the Original Dreamcast. 

PS4 success as several people have stated already is a combination of a lot of things being done right by Sony and a lot of things done wrong by their competitors.

Could Nintendo catch up if they abandon the Wii casual brand and focus on a new console?

So sony success comes exclusively from luck as well as its demise? And DS use cartridges and that didn't made a dent against piracy. Ps3 uses disc and survived a long time unhacked, x360 was hacked as hell and still leads tie ratio because of their MP strenght. Sure All is luck. Nintendo must have the worst luck on home consoles.

We aren't even halfway through the gen yet(or barely halfway). You guys might want to hold off declaring any winners yet or at least even the most 'powerful' console either until the gen actually ends. And no I'm not talking about the Xbox One or Wii U being the most powerful.

Besides I never trust gamers on the whole 'winning generations' thing. I've seen gamers pulling some mental gymnastics and goalpost moving to disqualify the Wii from any sort of 'win' that console had last gen. It's even started in this thread already.

In any case, I'm not sure how much of PS4's 'winning' is by itself or the blundering of Nintendo and Microsoft's marketing and the horrendous missteps they've made this gen. I feel it's like praising the one abled bodied runner who manged to not run into a pole at the start of the race or the guy in crutches who thought he'd be able to stand a chance.

Look at the software tie ratio of the PSP compared to the DS. It's not good. Normally the more units of hardware you sell, the lower the tie ratio is. Why do you think Sony switched to cartridges with the PSVita?

PS3 wasn't a mess because of piracy, but because it was too expensive and too complicated to develop for. It cost Sony billions of dollars, no matter how much hardware it managed to sell in the end.

It's not luck or bad luck, it's dumb decisions. Who has profited the most since PS entered the home console market: Nintendo or Sony? Who ever earned the most, fucked up the least.

The big three have all made stupid mistakes for the record. You're trying to make it sound like Sony only made good decisions, which is far from the truth.

Since Sony entered the console market Nintendo has had 4 success stories: the revival of the Gameboy (Pokémon in 1996), the GBA, the DS and the Wii. 3DS isn't doing too shabby either.

I haven't said anything like Sony doesn't screw up. You and others insist that whenever Sony wins is by luck. very Lucky to beat Nintendo 3:1 7:1 and 2,5:1... And when screwing up Nintendo beats Sony 1,15:1. Who won by luck or others mistake them?

You don't have the slightest Idea of Nintendo profit on consoles nor Sony loss because of Ps3, you have their reports that in the Nintendo case have hh and console and other merchandise together as well as a lot of Sony reports had other info. If you use hh to say Nintendo profited more on HOME console let's use MS total profit to say Xbox is the winner.

And on the topic of piracy you completely avoided answering and just stated that PSP have a worst tie ratio than DS using vgc bogus data and ignored that DS is equally easy to pirate and ps4 having bluray was harder to pirate than DS with cartridges. Also x360 didn't suffered with piracy even being easy to.