Why are you cutting the datapoints off at march when we have april?
Draw the points on a graph.
Xbone had one of the largest releases so far this year, with an exclusivity period and a massive marketing push, along with massive enthusiast press hype.
How did that translate into sales in its strongest market, the largest market there is?
Even if you reject the notion that PS4 had a booming launch due to unprecedented supply chains, with demand falling off sharply, how are two of the three major consoles selling poorly a good thing? How are PS4 Japanese sales irrelevant to overall market well being? If PS4 is doing so omg shit hot amazing, why did it sell less in its first april than supply constrained PS2 did in its first april?
Look a few posts up at my last reply to your flawed logic man. I'm not attacking you though, I'm just saying that the logic behind your posts seems flawed to me.
It has always been the case that when consoles first launch, the people buying them during the first year are the early adopters, the people willing to pay a premium to have the console within that first year.
In past generations, the consoles have been supply constrained at launch, meaning a lot of said early adopters had to wait for availability, thus the generally more gradual tapering off of sales over the first 12 months.
This generation that is not the case. There were over six million consoles in the retail channel during the 3-month launch window with XB1 and PS4 combined. Closer to 7 million IIRC. That has never, NEVER happened at any console launch in history, to have that many consoles available right off the bat.
The result is that those same early adopters that, in the past, would've had to wait until March/April/May to pick up a console were almost all able to pick one up during the 3-month launch window.
So yeah, you see a steep falloff of console sales around the 4-5 month mark now that over 10 million people have purchased a 'next gen' (current gen now) console, and there aren't many early adopters left ready to pony up that premium to be in on the ground floor.
For now there will be a bit of a lull in console sales until a) more heavy-hitter games arrive to bring in the fence-sitters from last gen and/or b) the consoles' prices drop to that sweet spot of $299 where the casuals/mass market start jumping in.
You are trying to compare apples to oranges when comparing previous generations' console launches up to and through the 6-month mark to this generation. It is not a proper comparison due to the fact that the market was flooded with so many during the launch window this time.
I'm sorry for being so OT so this is the last I will say on the matter. We're derailing a Nintendo thread here to go back and forth about XB1 and PS4 sales, which has already been done to death elsewhere. With regards to being on topic, a the Wii U is in a different situation than the XB1 and PS4 for a few reasons:
It's already past that early-adopter window as the price is now down to mass-market levels. However, the mass market doesn't even understand (or at least didn't for a long time) what the Wii U even is. I still talk to people very regularly that don't even realize the Wii U is a new system from the Wii. It's sales are still poor despite being at the lower price point. It is severely lacking 3rd party support. It has a controller that is mostly just a novelty and hasn't been justified by the software (see the Kinect's same fate, thankfully they're unbundling it). It has a company that simply isn't willing to do what it takes to make it a success (see MS's willingness to do an about-face on virtually every aspect of the XB1). All these factors combined spell a poor prognosis for the Wii U.
In short: XB1 and PS4 are fine, but on topic, the Wii U is far from fine.
