but did the ps4 and xbox one see very frontloaded sales? what's the trajectory? it seems they both experienced a rather big burst and are now performing at a severely reduced level for what would have been expected after their launches.
Actually the curve is more or less what we'd expect for a not-supply-constrained console. Let's assume the same number of people want to buy a PS4 in its first year as wanted to buy a PS2 in its first year. The PS2 was supply constrained, the PS4 is not. This means that the PS4 will drastically outsell the PS2 in its first few months and then undersell it for the rest of the year, because the PS2's sales curve was artificially smoothed out by supply issues.
Of course we don't know if that hypothetical is accurate or not. But the simple fact that the PS4 is underperforming the PS2 during the off-season doesn't mean anything.
it's unhealthy when a demographic disappears from the market. if the ps2 era started and all the people who jumped in because of voice acting and fmvs decided they really really liked pc gaming all of a sudden, and the dreamcast sold about 25m units and the gamecube sold 50m units, would that be returning to a trendline or wouldn't you see that as a huge decline?
if entire demographics are totally done with traditional gaming for forever and ever, i'm inclined to believe that it's more likely to happen with other demographics as time goes on. because what consumer doesn't want less expensive and more accessible entertainment? what developer doesn't want cheaper development tools and shorter production timelines? what happened with the wii is an omen, not an anomaly.
People who like voice acting and FMVs aren't a demographic, though. At least they're not a coherent demographic. The core console demographic, the demographic that accounts for the vast majority of console sales, has traditionally been youngish guys who like video games.
The people who the Wii attracted into the console market were always done with traditional gaming because they were never interested in traditional gaming in the first place. The fact that they came and went in the space of a few years doesn't really tell us anything about the health of the core console demographic.
Console gamers are hobbyists. They're spending hundreds of dollars on dedicated computers that exist (almost) exclusively to play video games: they're obviously not concerned principally with cost and "accessibility," or they'd have been playing graphically unimpressive browser games on the computers they all have owned for years. It's possible that mobile gaming will eat away at this market like it's been eating away at the handheld market, but it's hardly a foregone conclusion - and as of this moment we've seen basically no evidence of it. People have been buying powerful gaming computers to stick under their TVs for so long because they like playing good-looking games on their TVs, not because there were no cheaper, more accessible alternatives, because there were.
