The point that I was really making was the fact that people often look at the total number of units sold, 160 million, and assume that userbase is that big, and it simply isn't anywhere near that many.
And I'm arguing that you're making statements like the bolded as if it's fact when you actually have no possible way of knowing that. Your analysis is based on an already preconcieved idea that in realistic terms seems more than a little illogical to me.
Even if we estimate that both PS360 has a failure rate as high as 60% for their first two years, and that both sold upto 15 million unit each in their first two years (note: they didn't), that's only 19.2 million bricked consoles... out of 160 million!!!
Failure rates dropped off a cliff after the die shrinks and console redesigns, and even the intial rates wheren't anywhere near as high as 60%. Equally, the greater proportion of PS360 sales happened in the later years after multiple prices drops when the failure rates were negligible.
Even if we take my above rediculous estimate for bricked consoles and round up to the nearest million (for sh!ts and giggles), you cannot feasibly think that 140 million core gaming consoles (since we're not talking about the Wii here) were sold into a market of users, willing to pay as significant a premium as they did (i.e. between $599-150 over 8 years), only to get bored and a significant majority "move on to other things"?
It's your analysis and conclusions that I would argue are critically flawed. Not only because you're making conclusions based on a single month's worth of software sales in one territory, additionally you're not recognising the potential for extraeneous factors that lie outside of the pure sales number but will affect the market in a way as to muddle the view. many of these have been mentioned already in this thread; e.g. online gaming, huge existing libraries of games on existing platforms. Not to mention the fact that the only noteworthy release on PS360 in May was as you mentioned, Watchdogs, which clearly has been marketed and pushed both by its' publisher and a platform holder as a next-gen game (that's not even mentioning the fact that the last version is downright fugly).
Between a high early failure rate for the 360, and to a lesser extent PS3, and people who bought one to play COD during its boom, but have now become board of it and have moved on to other things.
The above makes no rational sense what to ever. Have you even been paying attention to the sales of COD titles? The series sales of more recent installments have barely dipped from their peak (BLOPS2 I believe), so only one game ago. And COD:AW is generating legitimate hype and excitement among the general gaming populace, both online and off.
The COD playerbase has not in any significant measure "become board of it and have moved on to other things". Your statement is patently false.
The active gamer community isn't shrinking, I just think its foolish to think there are 160 million people waiting to buy a next gen console, there aren't. The core gamer community isn't that much larger than it was a decade ago, the generation just lasted long enough to see a lot more people come and go. In a five or six year cycle, I would be shocked to see this generation of consoles sell any more units than the PS/N64/Saturn generation.
The core gaming userbase is likely larger than 160 million consoles, not only because the PS360 were not the only game console on the market able to play AAA console games. The Wii had its fair share, and likely held a cross-section of young gamers who had recieved their console as gift, but are now old enough to choose for themselves what console platform they intend to game on.
Of course there will be some console users that bought a box for one game and didn't really play anything else, moving onto other things, but those leaving console gaming will be miniscule in number and balanced out by the fact that you always have a newer generation of gamers who come of age and are now able to choose, afford and buy both consoles and games for themselves.
