Taken from the previous Media Create thread:
No no, i'm not saying that
It was indeed well acknowledged that price and the game selection were some of the main factors for PS3 low sale in the begining like you mention. But not many expected the PS3 to hit 10 million based on the early sales and the very strong competition from the Wii. The "wait for (insert game here)" arguement for PS3 was made fun of several of times for example, the most infamous one might be "wait for Virtua Fighter 5" (which was one of the first big title for PS3 in Japan). So early on there wasnt exactly any big optimism that some games would turn around the sales pattern for the PS3 in a big way. Maybe someone thought it, but there was definitelly much discussion around it that it wouldnt do much.
I dont know and percentange of how many that predicted what, but personally i can not remember many (if any?) 10 million predictions for PS3 in Japan in 2007 at least. The Media Create threads from that time are still up and running, so everyone can go back and look if they want
I do remember some predictions that the PS3 might not even outsell the Gamecube though. I'm not going to bash those predictions because the PS3 was selling bad in the begining, but it shows that long-term predictions might end up turning out to be very different from what will actually happen.
I cant comment much regarding the 5-6 years expected life cycle because i dont know what people thought about that. However, we did know that both the PS1 and PS2 kept on selling after the successors were released, so people should have accounted for that with the PS3 as well when the PS4 came out, unless they thought that the PS3 would be discontinued early, but in that case it shows that such a prediction didnt turn out like it would have been predicted. But regardless of how long the previous console generation was expected to last, its exactly this unknown factor that shows that long-term predictions might turn out to be very different from whats actually going to happen. That is the main point
Predicting long-term based on very early data doesnt necessarily end up being correct.
EDIT: Metal Gear Solid 4 didnt really do much for the PS3 hardware sales in Japan by the way. It caused a spike in the hardware sales the same week when MGS4 launched, but after that it went quickly down. Here you can see a graph of it:
The spike in week 31 is when MGS4 was released.
http://garaph.info/linecompare.php//weeks/52/sum/0/html/2/sys-0/PS3/date-0/2007-11-06