I think the simple and most concise answer is the gaming industry is now quite a bit bigger.

The userbase is probably bigger. Maybe because Nintendo being screwed up. Caused a lot of people to buy the other systems.

your analysis forgot to consider the wii. i know a lot of my friends started on wii and moved on to ps360. so my response is that ps4/x1 sales are neither front loaded or going through 1.5x growth. last gen was weird. this gen appears to be roughly following the ps2/xbox (one)/game cube era with little growth or contraction. last gen was just weird.

Also, I don't see any mention of the Wii U which I feel is an obvious and fundamental factor. It's marketshare is half what the wiis was and falling.

Hey Mods, you should probably lock this thread. padib already had a thread locked where he discussed this very thing until he pretended to get offended rather than refute something I said.

Also, padib. It appears you have not learned. You do not get to set the rules of your thread. You are not the king of this thread. I can say what I want so long as its within the rules of this site, and there's nothing you can do about it.

Moderated - Miguel_Zorro

I think some of it could be that PS3 and X360 had "delayed" sales. Because many people bought a Wii in 2006/2007 and so moved onto the PS3 and 360 later than the ordinarily would have done had the Wii not wowed them with Wii Sports.

How about how many hardware sales there were across all 3 7th gen systems at this point, vs how many hardware across all 3 8th gen systems? I think that would probably bridge that gap an awful lot, if not show that this gen's hardware is actually moving a bit slower?

52 more months? Sounds about right, sales would be close to 170M by then

I think we're going back to the 5-6 year cycles which would indicate that yes, they are more top loaded this generation.

I would say yes, they are more frontloaded. PS3 & 360 each peaked in 2011 which were their 5th & 6th full year on the market, that is incredibly late to peak.

Personally I think Xbox One's peak year will be either 2015 or 2016 & PS4's peak year will be 2016 or 2017.

It's kinda interesting that PS2+XB & PS3+360 sales are pretty similar. I think PS4+XB1 sales will also remain relatively stagnant.