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As with many other goods, console hardware sales grow substantially during the Christmas shopping season. Occasionally, a system might peak so early that it can’t really be said to have had a “growth” phase, while other systems don’t have a prominent and sharply-defined peak to speak of, but the general rule still remains, with systems inevitably entering a period of terminal decline after some sort of period of peak sales.Īnother “rule of sales” is the stimulative effect of certain holidays. There are only so many people willing and able to buy a console, after all, even a popular one, and the number of potential new buyers dwindles as the market becomes more and more saturated. Within each generation, any given system will almost always exhibit a “growth-peak-decline” pattern in its sales where sales grow from their initial levels, reach a point where they peak, and enter a period of terminal decline. As every gamer knows, the history of the console market is divided into more or less discrete “generations” where several platforms, usually with comparable abilities, spend nearly all of their lives contemporaneous to and serve as nominal competition for each other. The first and perhaps most notable “rule of sales” is that the console market is cyclical. To start things off, if you get into analyzing and discussing hardware sales, you’ll notice that there a couple of “general rules of console sales,” that is, basic patterns and behaviors that nearly all consoles adhere to regardless of their relative success or any factors that serve to affect sales. While many of the more general points I make in this article are already well-known to most others who also regularly discuss game sales, I felt this would still be a good resource for people less familiar with the subject material, and serve as a good go-to reference for more specific information on console sales. I hope that this will serve as a valuable reference for anyone else interested in the subject.
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The purpose of this article is to give a (mostly) complete history of hardware sales in the console market, showing the factors, trends, and data to give as complete of a picture as possible on the “how” and “why” of console sales. By understanding the “how” and “why” of sales, we can make reasonable guesses as to the relative success of a given system even early on in a generation, and explain the relative performance of any two consoles. Sales figures are obviously a good barometer of said health, and in looking through sales data for console hardware, I’ve come to observe that sales, while not exactly predictable in terms of numbers, are attributable to several major factors, and that we can understand how and why consoles sell what they do. As someone who has been playing video games for well over 30 years and has an avid interest in video games beyond just the games themselves, I felt that it was worth keeping up with the overall health of the industry.