This one's a little hard to follow, but bear with me. An analyst from DFC Intelligence believes that the only reason the PS3 has a chance of surpassing the 360 is because the Wii was there to cushion the 360's dominance. He says that, without the Wii, most of those sales would have gone to 360, leaving PS3 far and away in the dust. He also thinks that, now that PS3 is at a mass-market price and the Wii is waning (lol wut), this could be Sony's chance to retake dominance, all aided by the little white box in their war against the big white box

http://www.joystiq.com/2009/11/05/analyst-sony-was-saved-by-the-success-of-the-wii/

hum ...

I would say there is not way all the Wii sales would have gone on the 360 since a lot casual would just not have picked any console (the previously named "non gamer")

but for all the others, yeah, they would have gone 360 arcade all the way ...

I would say I do agree !

Wrong! With no Wii, or better yet, no Nintendo console, the market would have colapsed. The sales this gen would be way smaller than last and PS3 wouldn't be so behind x360 because of the migthy RROD. Without other option, people would have waited for a price drop or changed towards the PS3 way before. I'd bet that the GAP would be smaller. The HD total sales would be bigger than today, but not bigger enough to compensate the WII Juggernaught. That`s my two cents.

I'd say it was the other way around. Multi platting to keep games profitable was what kept the PS3 afloat long enough. If there was only one HD console to battle the Wii... It wouldn't look pretty right now. (for the HD)

If Wii didn't existed, then X360 Arcade would have sold four times what it actually sold. But then PS3 slim would win this gen, that's a given. It wasn't the Wii to blame for the low X360 sales at 2006/2007.

Stof beat me to it. The 360 saved the PS3 by launching a year early and establishing an HD console userbase. The 360 helped offset the development costs of making a PS3 title. Not only that without MS money hatting developers for JRPGs all of them, sans FFXIII, would probably be on the Wii.

 you can't say this IMO

you dont know if the current 360 owners would have bought a PS3 at the place
or if the current PS3 owners would have bought a 360 at the place

if yes, then the software sales will remain very high on the remaining HD and it would save it from the Wii.

what do you think ? 

Cushion the 360's dominance? The people who wrote this article need to visit VGChartz, or NPD, or GFK, MC, Fam or even go to a video game store once in a while. The Wii seems to be dominating quite convincingly

oh, the head start ... I see what you mean ...

so it is like, without 360, at the very start we may have seen the "supposed" hardcore third party shift to the Wii ...

I disagree.
Last year January-October hardware sales:
Wii: 15.2 million
360: 6.00 million
PS3: 6.92 million

And this year:
Wii: 11.7 million
360: 6.28 million
PS3: 7 million

See the lack of Wii sales transformed into HD sales? Neither do I.

If there would be no Wii, we would see about 7 million 360s and 8 million PS3s sold this year, and an industry crashed.