3DS: Launch. The price point and lack of compelling games at launch killed any chance the system had of reaching the same heights as its predecessor the DS. Sure Nintendo was able to save the system with a price drop and great games within the launch year, but it could have sold tens of millions more if it had the right price point and games in Spring 2011 and had the momentum right out of the gate.

Saturn: The shadow launch. Between the price and the pissing off of retailers, it killed the system outside of Japan, and the Saturn was dead on arrival.

Genesis: The focus on add-ons like the Sega CD and the 32X. Their cost, relative lack of games, and sheer bulk were simply unappealing compared to the elegance of the SuperFX chip enhancing SNES games without costing an arm and a leg and taking up half the living room. It didn't matter how amazing Star Wars Arcade looked when you had to turn your console into a Frankenstein's monster to play it and the competition could blow you away with DKC and Star Fox without needing expensive new hardware. A stronger focus on making great Genesis games instead of trying to turn the Genesis into Voltron would have kept the race with the Snes much closer than it ended up being.

I think the Xbox series S and X reveal was the point of no return, releasing 2 platforms the same gen that play the same games is stupid. From all the reports the series S is a real problem to downscale to from the series X

Yeah Starfield and Redfall fizzling last year was definitely a sign that the ship was taking on water, as was the fact that their steep discounts weren't having much of an impact.

Bringing their games to Playstation was just the final straw as it effectively made the system pointless.

Thought about that after my initial post. Dreamcast couldn't even kill PS1 in Japan and once PS2 was unveiled, it seemed grim even before the international launch of Dreamcast. 

For Xbox i think day and date releases on PC was the moment that Xbox could never recover from, in the sense that it made it impossible for them to ever sell Xbox360 numbers ever again, and if anything assured that they would continue to decline in console sales from there on.

While this did hurt them, I feel like it wasn't really a death knell as many people will just always prefer the convenience of a console over PC. What crippled Xbone, beyond the PR nightmare of its launch period, was more that it never got any exclusives worth a damn.

PS3 should not be in the list. It sold a lot, and if anything it recovered so well that it basically turned tables and became a popular console even after the lukewarm launch

Xbone I disagree, the sales in first year were acceptably good, on pair with Playstation 4. Things changed in 2015 when Xbox was estagnant selling bellow 10 million while PS4 exploded. The removal of mandatory kinect to lower its price helped sales on 2014, but by 2015 Sony had many first party bangers while Microsoft was unable to provide compelling games


Series SX in other hand was always dead at launch. No purchases mean you have no mandatory attachment to the platform. If you don't own a library there is less appeal in backwards compatability. Subscription model and releasing everything on PCs killed Xbox appeal. The sales of Sales SX were at least saved by lack of PS5 stock, otherwise it would have sold bellow 30 million lifetime

The Ps3 basically wiped out SEIs profits of the Ps1, 2 and PSP. It only recovered because Sony heavily subsidized it after it's horrible launch. The cell processor was more of a pain to develop for, so much so most Devs were willing to nearly hand over the 3rd party market to xbox exclusivly. It was a disaster.

Yeah i don't get it. Surely PS3 is a bigger bomb than the Wii U if it led Sony to lose billions more than Nintendo lost from the Wii U? The same way a game that lose more money is a bigger bomb than a game that lost less money?

Sony gambled that they were so dominant that the PS3 would sell more than the PS2, that gamble was a disaster and wiped away all the profits they had earned from gaming previously.

But it never reached a "point of no return". In reality it kinda made a comeback

It doesn't belong to this thread