you're not listening to what I said. The 360's sales picked up and took off AFTER the PS3 hit shelves and was a known quantity. It's first year sales weren't anything to write home about, since everyone was waiting to see what Sony would do. That's why "launch aligning" the first year of the 360 doesn't make any sense. most people didn't jump in until year two, which is what the economist graph shows.
Alright, I take your point.
The wii sales WERE relevant when you consider what was competition for the PS2 at that time. The PS2 was a low cost, sixth gen console competing directly for sales dollars with the wii, which was close to it in performance. AT THAT TIME, the casual market was still picking up cheap consoles to play the occasional game or watch a movie.
Tablets and smartphones changed that game midway through the generation. The casual audience is more likely to use an iphone or ipad for this. That market is gone as of 2010/2011 and isn't coming back.
Positing that the casual market constituted a significant portion of the PS2's sales towards the end of its lifespan isn't the same thing as positing that it constituted a significant portion of the PS2's sales at the beginning of its lifespan.
Anyway, as I see it we're having two separate arguments:
1. About whether it's at all likely the PS4 will outsell the PS2 worldwide.
2. About whether the seventh generation had a healthy start or not.
The seventh generation had a healthy start if you think a significant portion of those blue ocean Wii buyers were just the continuation of the PS2's pre-existing casual playerbase with some non-gamers. If you believe that then you believe the Wii's sales were just a straightforward redo of the PS2's sales until tablets came along and that longstanding part of the console market vanished. The seventh generation is just like the sixth generation, according to this theory, with some reshuffling: casual PS2 players switch to Nintendo, a sizable chunk of core PS2 players switch to Microsoft, there's a rump left behind on the PS3.
I don't subscribe to that belief. I think software sales totals demonstrate that the casual/proto-Wii portion of the PS2's playerbase was relatively small (look at the sales totals for Singstar and the like compared to core games on the PS2 or the Wii's most popular casual franchises) and backloaded: in its early years it was a recognizably "core" system. It's not plausible that the Wii's early sales came principally from casual PS2 players. The Wii's sales success came from a larger proportion of non-gamers (and second console owners, who for the purposes of my argument are the same since the reason they were buying a second console was a unique characteristic of the Wii) compared to PS2 defectors. It was unrepresentative from the start because a very large proportion of its audience hadn't even been part of the market in the sixth generation: the seventh generation had a genuine influx of non-gamers who went straight to the Wii, and this covered up the fact that lots of core PS2 gamers just weren't buying PS3s and 360s until later in the generation.
This is why I'm less skeptical of the PS4 staying within striking distance of the PS2 than you are: I don't think the now-vanished casual market constituted a significant proportion of the PS2's sales early on, and I think the core has expanded enough since then that it's possible it'll be enough to counteract the disappearance of the casuals and the relatively increased competition from Xbox.
Edit: The counterargument to this could be "some of the vanished casuals were actually playing games that we would nowadays consider core on the PS2." That's certainly accurate to an extent, but I'm not sure I buy that they constituted a very large proportion of PS2 players. The most likely candidate for a "core" series popular among casuals on the PS2 is probably GTA, and it's not like GTA sales seem to have suffered from the casual exodus to tablets.
haters!
