The Nintendo Fusion

[TornadoCreator]

The main reason I compared with 2008, 2009, and 2010 is; I feel they better match this year. The PS3 wasn't released worldwide until March 2007 with the European/Australian release and even Xbox 360 didn't have a true worldwide release till February 2007 with the Russian/Eastern European release. I didn't want years with misleading statistics because they matched up with the PAL launch date or something. 

 

Sure the generation may start in 2005 in USA or Japan, but this gen is the first time a largely worldwide release happened all at the same time (and even then the PS4 was delayed in Japan for no clear reason).

 

That said, I can look at July 2007:

Xbox 360 was struggling at this time with only 67,000 sales but other systems where doing fine; PS3 was at 97,000 but this picked up by August to well over 110,000 (likewise the 360 started to reliably sell over 125,000 per week by the end of August). The top three systems though where all selling well, PSP was at 180,000, the Nintendo Wii despite being out less than a year was on 300,000 weekly sales, and the DS was at a sickening 462,000 sales that week. Puts this gen to shame really when the DS in 2007 can outsell eveything combined in 2014.

 

PS4 actually needs 3.7 million sales to reach a golden ratio; what that means is with annother 3.7 million units, the PS4 will have a large enough userbase that less than half of them need to adopt new software for it to be successful; but even then that's not really enough.

 

Sure PS4 not far from 10 million sales, and hell the Dreamcast only managed lifetime sales of 10.4 million units... but times have changed. Back in 1999-2001, games needed on average around 600,000-800,000 sales to break even. Back then massive runaway successes rarely topped 3 million sales. Sonic Adventure sold only 2.42 million for example. Games today need 6 million sales to break even and 20+ million sales to be considered modern runaway successes. Some like Call Of Duty and GTA V even manage that... but on PS4 (or any 8th gen systems, or even all combined), there's simply not enough of a userbase for the modern bloated budget games to be successful; which is likely why the indie game scene has exploded so much. With current budgets, PS4 needs 40 million units out before games can reliably expect to be profitable as an exclusive... but without the exclusives, how will PS4 sell anything close to that.

 

Either game publishers like EA, Square Enix, Activision, and Ubisoft need to fundamentally change how they publish games, or this industry is going to completely collapse; and that's not taking into account the imminent FPS bubble burst, which will take the entire industry down with it regardless. Mark my words, this generation will see more than half the industry bankrupt much like the crash of '83. 30 years on and history repeats itself.

Edited July 14, 2014 by TornadoCreator