I do like a good, close fight. It's why I still think the 16-bit era was the best console war. I didn't know it at the time (because EGM didn't report sales figures), but it was the closest of dead-heat races. And the console makers didn't exactly have an amiable public relationship, Sega especially laying heavily into the attack ads. I mean, you sure as shit don't see ads that strike tones like this anymore:

Things got savage. The competition was fiercer. Any everyone wanted a slice of Nintendo's pie after the Big N dominated the 8-bit era and became synonymous with gaming. The other guys needed to position themselves as the "cooler" alternative to "kiddie" Nintendo in order to draw that market share away. To their credit, Nintendo took the high road most of the time (they did have a Super Mario Land 2 ad that struck an anti-Sega tone). But things were cutthroat back then. I don't think we should go back to that, but I do like to see healthy competition.

Last gen was an odd one. The Wii smoked everyone at the start of the gen, but dropped quickly, coming in second in both the U.S. & Europe despite winning the gen in global sales. The PS3 & 360 ended up with similar lifetime numbers by pure coincidence. The PS3 actually sold at a faster rate globally than the 360, but launched a year behind. Also, there were significant regional differences. In the U.S., the 360 dominated the PS3 for most of the gen, though there were two periods where they were close in monthly sales (Jan.-Aug. 2008, and Sept. 2009 - May 2010). In Europe the PS3 dominated the 360 on the continent while the UK was similar to the U.S. In Japan the 360 was largely ignored, plus the overall home console market in Japan declined and the PS3 sold half what the PS2 did. Neither the PS3 nor 360 were close in any one region. The math just happened to work out with the PS3 just barely surpassing the 360 by the end of the generation.

But the 16-bit war was fought only in one region: North America. The SNES and Genesis had a constant back-and-forth, and remained almost tied in non-aligned LTD sales:

The SNES dominated Japan, and the Mega Drive won in Europe by a comfortable margin (though the console market in Europe was still very small then). But the 16-bit Wars in the U.S. was by far the closet contest ever, and it was a genuine contest, not a coincidental close battle driven by fluke math.

Yep. The SNES won globally thanks to its resounding victory in Japan. The Super Famicom beat the Mega Drive by a 4.8-to-1 ratio, or about 13.6M units, which accounts for nearly all of Nintendo's margin of victory that generation. Sega never really did well in Japan, the Saturn, oddly enough, being their most successful console there, and it only sold about 6 million units there.

The SNES was also indeed the last Nintendo console to have decent legs, and incidentally it was the last one to have strong continued support late in life, not just from Nintendo but from third parties as well. In 1996 it had games like Mega Man X3, Super Mario RPG, Ultimate MK3, and Donkey Kong Country 3. In 1997 it had Harvest Moon and Kirby's Dream Land 3, plus a "slim" model of the SNES was released. And that's just the notable stuff. There were a lot of minor titles released, with an enhanced remake of Frogger being the last officially licensed game released for it in North America. Just the impression that "Hey, this system is still getting support" was enough to keep it selling even after the N64 was released. It wasn't even officially discontinued in America until 1999, three years after the N64 was released and only two years before the GameCube was released.

Meanwhile, support for the N64 slowed down quickly in 2001. The first half of the year was decent, with Mega Man 64, Paper Mario, Conker, Dr. Mario 64, and Mario Party 3 releasing between January and May, but the second half of the year had nothing. And support was nearly nonexistent in 2002, with Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 3 being as far as I can tell the only game released that year for the N64. And the GameCube and Wii followed the N64 in having dwindling support nearing their respective replacement's launch, and nearly nonexistent support after that.

Meanwhile, systems like the PS1 & PS2 that had strong late-life support continued to sell decently late in life and, like the NES and SNES, had longer lives in general. The PS3 & 360 didn't have PS2-level or even PS1-level legs, but by 2012 they had already gotten close to saturation, so there was a lot fewer potential customers to sell to, but even then they had better post-replacement legs than the Wii did. Of course, the PS3 & 360 make me wonder how much longer the PS4 & XBO can keep it up at this rate before entering the terminal decline phase of their lives.

Well, the console market is cyclical, and every console goes through a growth-peak-decline life cycle (rarely, some effectively peak right away, with no period of sales growth), which is why we have console generations in the first place. Typically, a system will reach a "sweet spot" price at which it sells at its best, but once that boost runs out of gas, terminal decline is largely irreversible, though depending on how much it sold LTD when it passed its peak the decline can be slowed down through price cuts and continued strong support. It's just a simple fact of the matter that there are only so many people that will buy a particular console, even a hugely popular one, and eventually you run out of new customers to sell them to. I think this happens naturally, and that once a system has passed its peak the parent company starts planning a replacement, rather than the shift to developing for next-gen causing the decline. Look at the Vita in Japan. It continues to get pretty solid support, and no replacement is on the horizon, yet sales continue to decline, with sales so far this year being down over 56% from last year. Sony is just running out of people to sell the thing to.

The decline every system faces is inevitable. However, that's not to say that the parent company (and third parties, for that matter) don't have any effect on the rate of decline and the strength of the legs. The speed of the decline appears to be determined by two main factors

1) Strong continued support. Sales legs are usually dependent on how well a system is supported late in life. The NES, SNES, PS1, and PS2 all had strong legs and strong late-life support, while the N64, GameCube, Wii, and most if not all handhelds all have had rapid declines and poor late-life support. The 360 & PS3 were the exceptions as they had weak legs but strong late-life support, but by time they passed their peaks, they had already sold a lot relative to their final lifetime tally. At the end of 2011, the 360 had sold 32.68M in the U.S., nearly double what the PS2 had sold when it passed its peak.

2) The release of a new next-gen system typically has an immediate impact on its predecessor's sales, the one exception being the PS3 (it didn't have an effect on PS2 sales until it was cut to $400). We usually see a bigger drop in sales percentage-wise the year a system gets replaced, but I've noticed that always seem to be because holiday sales take a huge drop. For example, the 360 had a YoY drop of 42.5% in 2013 in the U.S. However, the Jan.-Oct. period experienced a YoY drop of only 33.5%, vs. a drop of 51.5% for the Nov.+Dec. period. Likewise, the drops for the PS3 for the non-holiday and holiday periods in 2013 vs. 2012 were 28.3% and 48.3%.

Regarding the PS3 & 360 having late peaks, I think that was largely on purpose. Price cuts were spaced out more over time than in prior generations, and were relatively smaller. As a result, both systems were, when adjusted for inflation, more expensive than the PS2 at any given point in their lives. Even the PS4 and (post-Kinect removal) XBO, despite having initial prices about equal to the PS2's, had smaller initial price cuts (and the PS4's was much later in its life than the PS2's was), and even after two permanent price cuts, the PS4 & XBO still only saw a proportional drop of 25%, vs. the 33% cut the PS2 got from its first price cut. At this point in its life, the PS2 was only about $194 in current dollars. The PS4 & XBO had standard prices of $300 & $280 respectively this year. I believe that by spacing out price cuts and making them smaller, it generates more modest growth and later peaks, extending the generation, not only giving the system a longer life but also buying time for Sony & MS to produce a system that generates more gains that what we'd see if the gap was only five years.

Imagine if the PS4 & XBO came out two years earlier and retailed for $400. They wouldn't be nearly as powerful as they were (and consequently even less visual improvement, making gamers question if the jump was even worth it more than they already did), or if they were as powerful, they'd likely be significant loss leaders, or Sony & MS might have had to bump up the price. And, assuming the 5-year gen cycle continued apace after that, the PS5 & Xbox 4 would be out now, and would only be about on par with the Pro or X1X.

Longer gens do have clear benefits in this era where increases in computing power over time are proportionally not as large as they were 15, 20, 25+ years ago. The decade from the PS1 & N64 to the 360 & PS3 saw a lot more improvement than the decade from the 360 & PS3 to the Pro and X1X. Compared to the N64, the 360 had 128 times as much RAM (and far better and faster RAM) and a GPU with at least 1200 times the FLOPS. We haven't seen anything close to that amount of progress this past decade. Longer generations are arguably necessary for Sony & MS, and it appears that simple pricing is enough to keep the ball rolling on sales without having to worry about an early peak followed by relatively much lower sales by year five.

Hey. I'm right here, you know. Are you going to actually address my argument and apologize for the disrespectful comments or not?

Check my reply to you in the other thread. I will say that 350k is a more reasonable prediction, because it's within in the 275-375k range we knew it had to be at.

If you're talking about my "Now, who was it that was saying that this was "unimpressive," hm?" comment, yeah, in retrospect that was needlessly snarky on my part.

Quickrick, if you see this, sorry about that one.

To get back on target, we have an estimate for combined PS4+XBO sales for October. LTD aligned PS4+XBO sales are up 24.4% over 360+PS3, which gives us 37,291.7k. This gives a number of 296.6k for October. I'll update my combined PS4+XBO charts later tonight.

Wait, so Switch essentially sold the same as PS4+XBO last month? So unimpressive

Wait, so Switch essentially sold the same as PS4+XBO last month? So unimpressive

Are those the winning numbers from the prediction thread?