Cerebralbore101 said:
slab_of_bacon said:
The market is shrinking right now so this is fair decision by Mircrosoft. Competition does benefit the sector though, so hopefully Nintendo will continue to innovate.
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The market isn't shrinking. It's not as simple as comparing handheld sales + home console sales from 7th gen with console and handheld sales from 9th gen. Multiple people owned both a DS and Wii because they needed it to play all Nintendo games. They now just own a Switch. Also one system sold doesn't = one customer. Systems are often family devices so a single system can harbour anywhere from 1 to 5 individual customers. So you can't just say DS sales were at 150 million and Wii sales were at 100 million therefore Nintendo lost 95 million customers since gen 7.
The high-end console market is definitely shrinking but that's more of a result of stagnant corporations than lack of player interest. Sony and MS have both ported their games to PC which reduces interest in their consoles. Both have raised prices on their consoles, instead of cut prices. Historically Xbox and Playstation consoles are half their launch price by now.
Edit: Also with Nintendo handhelds like Gameboy Advance two or more kids would own a system. But with Switch and Switch 2 it's common for there just to be a shared household Switch by the TV. Dedicated handheld devices sold differently than home consoles. To just add them all up, without context, is Pachter level bean counting.
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Good point. People forget that there's a tremendous amount of overlap, so total hardware sales volume won't accurately reflect the actual size of the market. According to data from both last generation and this generation, nearly half of Xbox owners in the U.S. also own a PlayStation. That clearly demonstrates that the "console wars" are not a zero-sum game. Since that first report was in 2020 we can assume that was the final overlap between the two. Using the figures in that report and cross-referencing them with NPD data, we can estimate that there were roughly 48.66M U.S. households that owned a PS4 and/or an XBO. That's substantially less than the roughly 63.9M units they sold combined. 13.78M households owned both systems (I was one of them).
This is something that goes even further back. A 2009 NPD report also showed substantial overlap between 360, PS3, and Wii owners. That was less than three years after the PS3 was released, so we don't know if the percent of people who owned both a 360 & PS3 increased as the generation progressed, but it still demonstrates that significant overlap existed. We unfortunately don't have any data from older generations, but anecdotally, I've owned an SNES & Genesis, a PS1 & N64, and all four Gen 6 systems (I'm clearly a video game fan with no brand loyalty), so it's not like it was unheard of 20-30+ years ago, either.
While it's hard to calculate the exact size of the market for conventional home consoles, it's at least still bigger than it was in the 80s & 90s. Over 48M U.S. households owning a PS4, XBO, or both is only slightly less than the total combined sales of the PS1, N64, & Saturn, and substantially larger than combined SNES & Genesis sales, and considering there was likely a good amount of overlap back then, that means the market for consoles has grown considerably from where it was in the 90s.
What we don't know is what people who consistently own an Xbox but not a PlayStation will do if MS leaves the hardware market entirely. There were over 15.2M American gamers last generation who owned an XBO but not an PS4, which is still a lot of people. Assuming they're all brand loyalists, would they decide to move to PC, or would they buy a PlayStation? However many end up moving to PC is how much the market for conventional home consoles would decrease.
I left Nintendo out because they kind of do their own thing and I was focusing more on traditional/conventional home consoles, which Nintendo stopped making after the GameCube. They've been doing their own thing since the Wii, and have now moved towards "hybrid" hardware. Adding Nintendo to the mix makes estimating the size of the console market even more difficult. But we do know from multiple reports that a very large percentage of Switch units in the U.S. were owned by people who also owned a PlayStation and/or Xbox, again demonstrating significant overlap. Back in April 2019, NPD's Mat Piscatella stated in a now-deleted tweet that half of Switch owners in the U.S. owned a PS4 while 40% owned an XBO. And it's not just in the U.S. where this is a thing, obviously. One report near the end of 2020 indicated that 60% of Switch owners in the UK owned a PS4, while 51% owned an XBO; there was also PS4/XBO overlap comparable to that seen in the U.S.
In any case, even if you account for overlap, the market for conventional consoles is still large and healthy even if it's hard to calculate exactly. The size of the console market gets even bigger when you add Nintendo to the mix. But it's never as big as total console sales because of said overlap.
Edited to fix broken link and some typos.
Last edited by Shadow1980 - on 03 November 2025
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