It depends, breaking 200M in sales or in price?

Not a chance, unless markets outside the main three (NA, Japan, & Europe) really open up to consoles and start buying them in massive quantities. Initially, NA and Japan were the only major markets for consoles. Europe finally adopting consoles en masse was what propelled the PS1 to be the first home console to sell over 100M units. That's how important opening up new markets for consoles is for growth.

The combined market for PlayStation & Xbox sat at around 170-175M for the previous two generations (it was 184M for Gen 6 due to the absurdly long legs of the PS2), and there is considerable overlap between the two in terms of ownership, meaning the actual market for conventional consoles is smaller than their combined sales would suggest. On Nintendo's end, even with everything going in their favor, they've managed 150M+ on two separate occasions, but nowhere close to 200M. The 150-160M really does seem to be the upper limit for any console, and for conventional consoles, even if Xbox collapses and PlayStation absorbs, say, 80% of the people who owned an Xbox but not also a same-gen PlayStation, after accounting for the portion that owned both an Xbox and a PlayStation you're still talking maybe at best PlayStation going back to PS2-level sales or close to it.

For now, the hardware market is as big as it's going to get. Maybe if China, India, and other emerging markets start buying consoles by the tens of millions, we'll see future growth, but that's just a hypothetical scenario that isn't guaranteed to happen.

No, because AI drove up RAM and memory prices, thus fucking up the console market like it's fucked up everything else. I hope all AI data centers go up in smoke.

The Nintendo Switch family of systems (which includes Switch 1 and Switch 2, all SKUs) is already approaching the milestone. Shouldn’t be all too much longer.

There is no market for 200M console at this moment. Japan and Europe are facing strong demographic crisis, only in USA console market doesn't look in immediate danger of decline

Their hopes were emerging market, but consoles are too expensive for LATAM and most of Asia, all them game heavily on PC

Again all, the question is for the next 3 generations, and the next 20ish years. Not for now exactly, or tomorrow, or after 3 years. So the fact that in the moment there is bad economy, ram and ssd prices go up or whatever else, is just for now, for the moment, not for the next 20ish years.

I don't think there will even be three more generations. If there is, it won't look like today's industry at all.

At this rate it's more likely that systems will cost $200m within the next 3 gens.

I think you accidentally added a zero there brother 😔

Thanks to AI and billionaires.