Beautiful. Glad to see PS4+XBO outperforming their predecessors.

Thank you for all of these!

It really speaks to how significantly the NA market has shrunk that matching the PS4's early NA sales is something to celebrate. They're obviously not bad (in a vacuum they're even pretty good), but we're talking about a system that spent years being the leader in a market where every one of its competitors were significantly down compared to their predecessors, and yet there's a decent chance it wouldn't even be 3rd in the 7th gen.

Things do seem to be getting better though. Thanks to a combination of the PS4's stubborn consistency, the Switch's own successes, MS finally escaping its mistakes, and the 3DS somehow still being alive, the NA market is actually looking pretty healthy.

Great work.

PlayStation & Xbox are the only ones representing the conventional market two generations in a row.

Conventional market is bias built by major media and bad journalism. All people buy videogame for play games. Are three form factor: stationary, portable and hibrid. But all dedicaded videogame have one purpose: play games. 

When you don't count wii/ds/psp/wiiu/switch/psvita you don't see the whole picture and is not a good market analysis.

When did he ever say he was analyzing the market as a whole? He was simply comparing gen over gen sales of PS & XB consoles, it's not his fault you misinterpreted the point of his graphs.

NA market hasn't really shrunk yet though, maybe soon in the future when we hit the evergreen years of 360+PS3. If we count NS+ Wii U years then surely they can match the Wii. PS4+XB1 as pointed out in the chart is 8m ahead of PS3+360, so technically NS+ Wii U only has to be 8m below it. Even then I suppose the Wii did explode, but it was quite the anomaly.

What might appear to be shrunk is the non holiday months, which is made up during the holidays of course. But we still had a few monster PS4 months.

I was referring to the NA console market as a whole (so home + handheld). The market the Wii opened up largely left, and handhelds were nuked from orbit. Despite what should be ideal factors for a market leader, the PS4 hasn't exactly set NA on fire. 

As Shadow's bottom graph shows, the overall console market was heavily down. Even now it's nowhere near the peaks of the 7th gen, but the combined effect of the Switch's success and the PS4 and X1 growing despite the added competition has at least shifted things back up.

My point was largely aimed at how much the 7th gen was able to expand the console market, and how poorly the 8th gen capitalised on it (though it's debatable how much they could have done in the face of the oncoming mobile and PC storm).

Actually, the Switch is selling a bit slower than the 3DS in Japan:

It's posting much better numbers than a home console typically does, but so far it's not been doing as strongly as the 3DS. To be fair, though, the 3DS was posting absolutely amazing numbers for the 2011-2013 period, some of the best in the history of the Japanese market (the 3DS's 2012 performance in particular was the third-best year for any single system, after the DS's showings in 2006 & 2007), and it's the #3 best-selling system ever there after the DS and Game Boy. So, that's hardly a slight against the Switch. We'll have to see what happens once it gets a main-series Pokemon game and a price cut under its belt, and maybe a couple of other series that did well on Nintendo handhelds (e.g., Animal Crossing), before we can get an idea of how well the Switch will do longer-term in Japan.

Handhelds and Wii  did well but mostly in just unit sales after all. The console market is much more healthy with very few closures compared to those days.I am sure Sony MS and NIntendo could have been A LOT more liberal with their price cuts ex: $99 Vita, Wii U, $149 PS4, XB1, Switch and gotten more unit sales. But that would mean much less revenue and less healthy market like in the 7th gen.

While the PS2, Wii, DS, PSP, PS3, 360 all had good unit sales, they didn't exactly lead to more profits like most video game companies are finding now.

Shadow1980 said: 

Gen 7 was ludicrously over-inflated. Nintendo far exceeded everyone's expectations thanks to the Wii and DS being runaway successes, and Sony surprised everyone by making the first (and only) successful handheld that wasn't a Nintendo system.

On the home console side, as I mentioned in a previous post all of the gen-over-gen losses have been on Nintendo's side thanks to the Wii U's failure. The Switch is making up for that, but the Switch is not and never was going to enjoy the same level of success as the Wii. Meanwhile, conventional consoles, as represented by PlayStation & Xbox, has remained an incredibly stable market. Combined PS4+XBO sales in the U.S. have stayed at over 9 million per year every year so far (excluding 2013 for obvious reasons), something their predecessors couldn't pull off.

-snip-