I think that's a pretty ridiculous caveat.
Of course it's not. If you were shopping for a car you wouldn't buy the cheap one your neighbour has been building himself in his spare time which runs on compound made from used teabags, would you? At least I assume you wouldn't.
The ones with 'the stench of death about them' were priced cheaper to try and encourage customers. That gambit failed because price isn't the only factor.
Price isn't the only factor but the highest selling console for the last four generations has been the console that has spent most of the its life in the market at the lowest price to the credible competition. That's a
fact. Price
isn't the only factor but this same discussion gets repeated on this forum every few months and the truth is the factors of product choice will vary person to person, group to group and country to country. While you can define the various factors you can't meaningful measure and weigh them. I.e. you'll never know for sure why 40m people bought a PlayStation 4 instead of an Xbox One. But it's surely not a coincidence that the less expensive platform has consistently done well and why the expensive options, going back to the Atari 7600 and fourth generation consoles lie NeoGeo didn't do well. Console history is littered with things like that. How about 3DO? GameBoy vs. PSP/Vita.
And it's pretty typical for the less valued product to be priced cheaper than the more popular product to try and attract the more price conscious customer. If you exclude cheaper products because people don't want them (which is why they're priced cheaper), then yes, the cheapest (wanted) product is the one that sells best, which is of course a self-satisfying argument.
For stand alone products that is true, for products whose value is dependant on an accompanying ecosystem that is patently not the case. Again, Ouya.
As a pure argument, 'does the cheapest product always sell best?', definitely not.
As a pure argument, has the cheapest credible console sold the most for four generations? The answer is yes. You can debate credible if you like. There were other factors too, Sony marketed PlayStation to 20 somethings like me (when I was 20 something!) with WipeOut when everybody else was still targeting kids or their parents. Timing, as I mentioned in my previous post, is critical. Would PlayStation and PS2 had done well well if launched a year later? Probably not because some competition was more entrenched and other competitor's products closer to launch. Would PS4 have sold as well if Microsoft saying one dumb inconsistent confusing thing after another? Probably not. Timing and the ability to achieve quick inertia are important.
But price? When did the least price conscious product ever dominate any market? Once. iPod. The Outlier.
