This time I think it's beacuse people wanted something "new" this time around and the Wii gave it.


The PS360 didnt offer anything significant except HD graphics and lets face it that is only extremly important to these so called "hardcore" players.

There are 2 phases in the console generation cycle:

1. Revolution: A new system allows developers and gamers to see videogames in an entirely new way
2. Evolution: A new system takes the revolutionary concepts of the previous generation and refines them

Revolutionary systems are successful because they're the system that becomes directly associated with the revolution ... Evolutionary systems are sucessful because of brand name, the early mover advantage and consumer expectations.

In neither stage is the technical performance of the hardware of primary importance, and many of the things which are more important then technical performance work against being the most powerful console of the generation.

Based on history, you really have to wonder what possessed Sony to make the most powerful console? It's like a death sentence. The most powerful always suffer from being too expensive for the market and being expensive to develop for.

Otherwise there's a lot of factors that determined the winners in each gen but generally the winner expanded the market beyond that of the previous generations systems.

Makes you wonder if the next-gen (not the current gen) consoles should take a step back?

Strip their machines of HD, go back to CD based drives, remove online, put a cable back onto controllers, reduce polygon counts....  we've got a clear winner here

There is no correlation between power and sales. The economics of video games is MUCH more complicated.

They suffered from the same thing Nintendo did in the late 90s:

Arrogance and over confidence in their brand.

The trouble for Sony, however, is that it is highly unlikely that, given Nintendo's history, they would be given an opportunity by Nintendo to regain their dominance.  I have my doubts as to whether the Wii will surpass the ps2 in lifetime sales, but it is possible.

Much more likely however, the console sales will be much closer in the following generations, with no clear dominant console.

Here's the answer:

Superior Marketing (Aggressive and Viral)
Superior Business Model (An extensive plan for the next 1- - 20 years)
and in Nintendo's case
This includes finding a way to force 3rd party development on their platform.

With the PSX Sony used money and developers wanting out of the Nintendo/Sega stranglehold.

the reason ps2 won was because of the dvd. i know lots of people that picked ps2 over gamecube/xbox just because it had a dvd player. sure the xbox had a remote but you had to pay extra for that. as for the wii i think its a mixture of the motion sensing and the wider audience that gave it the ability to sell horendously.

As I think the debates above make clear, for most generations, the difference in power between one console and the next was often negligible, and imperceptible to the majority of the target audience. This is the first generation since the 2600 in which one console is clearly inferior to it's competition.

Then consider that, really, we're talking only 6 real generations of games - 2600, NES, SNES, PS1, PS2, Wii, which is still too small a sample size to make any definitive rules about who will and who will not win. If anything, the most consistent variable seems to be who comes to market first, as that gave the 2600, NES and PS2 a big leg up on the competition, but even this rule doesn't apply to the SNES, PS1 or Wii. (The one clear advantage most of them had was the biggest library, but that's most likely the result, not the cause, of their success).

N64 was more powerfull than PS1.
PS1 had the cd player, that's it.
The problem with N64 was the storaging limitations.