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Who "won" in the 7th Generation of consoles?

Who won the 7th Generation?

  • Total voters
    173
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Some have already said it and I agree: everyone "won".

People got arguably the best 3D Mario games and therefore 3D platformers of all time with the Galaxy games, Metroid Prime 3, Zelda Twilight Princess (I also liked Skyward Sword), Donkey Kong Country Returns, Kirby's Epic Yarn, Xenoblade Chronicles (one of the best JRPGs around and basically the "start" of Monolith Soft greatness).
Playstation 3, while not as great as PS2, was the last good thing Sony delivered. Their first party might actually have been the strongest in that generation. We got the Motorstorm games, Wipeout, God of War 3 (the last good one), the Killzone games, Resistance 3, Sly, the Uncharted games, The Last of Us, Tokyo Jungle, Demon's Souls and many other great games.
And Xbox360 was obviously the peak of Xbox. Was a third-party powerhouse and it was when Microsoft's first-party delivered banger after banger. Halo 3, Halo Reach, the Gears of War games, Fable 2, Forza Horizon started on 360, Project Gotham Racing (RIP) 3 & 4, Viva Pinata... all great games.

Console ecosystems were still simple and not the service-based overpriced subscription hellholes that Microsoft, Sony and Nintendo are trying to trap consumers in.
 
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It was an exciting generation for sure

Sonys worst, until PS5 beat it

Xbox best still.

Nintendos was just crazy - but also interesting

Personally I probably played most 360 overall - so many third party games were way superior there
 
360 - PS3 - Wii.

It was a good boxing match between 360 and PS3 in terms of exclusives, but i feel PS3 just edges out 360 there. As for multiplatform games, which make up like 95% of the generation, 360 almost always had the better versions, sometimes by quite a margin, so 360 wins for me.

Wii is last because i dont give a shit about it.
 
StreetsofBeige said:
Also handhelds too. Any console gamers on the go had DS and PSP to choose from as well.
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Nintendo definitely won/is still winning the handheld war. DS and then 3ds were awesome, and then Switch Lite. PSP deserved better, and then the Vita was just a failure mostly.

Even buying games on 3ds eshop was awesome. Your downloaded games were presents waiting for you to unwrap :]

I guess the Steam Deck's kind of a competitor too, but I don't think it's a serious threat to Nintendo yet? :pie_thinking:
 
Clear winner: the Wii.
Second place: the Xbox 360, because it came from around 25 million and performed really well with 85 million.
Third place: the PS3, because it came from 150+ million and droped to 85 million. They were lucky to have the Blu-ray drive while Microsoft didn't. Otherwise, that could have turned out really badly.
 
I have a hard time looking back on that generation and identifying an actual winner. The Wii sold the most consoles and brought Nintendo back into the console space as a contender. Though they went right back into being thrashed with the Wii U. The thing is, Wii didn't have a commanding mindshare over the console space. Both 360 and PS3 were highly competitive at higher price points and missing the boat on the motion gaming fad that made Wii so successful for a few years.

360 put Xbox on the map and it was the only time the brand was truly competitive. It didn't introduce online console gaming but it opened the floodgates for it. PS3 managed to come from behind and ultimately surpass 360 in console sales while being the device that made Blu-ray a success and the default physical medium since. All consoles had fantastic games and none of them felt behind or really all that ahead. Early victories were eaten away.

If you ask me, that generation was the end of the golden age of console gaming. And it was a quite a crescendo. For probably the first time ever, all the major players were a success. They were all competitive. Picking a winner feels like a disservice to how special that time period was.
 
Cakeboxer said:
They were lucky to have the Blu-ray drive while Microsoft didn't. Otherwise, that could have turned out really badly.
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Not really.

If the PlayStation 3 didn't have Blu-ray, it would've cost $200 less, therefore making it more affordable for more gamers.

The Blu-ray drive in fact hindered Sony's sales during the 7th generation.
 
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Hudo said:
And Xbox360 was obviously the peak of Xbox. Was a third-party powerhouse and it was when Microsoft's first-party delivered banger after banger. Halo 3, Halo Reach, the Gears of War games, Fable 2, Forza Horizon started on 360, Project Gotham Racing (RIP) 3 & 4, Viva Pinata... all great games.
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Xbox Live Arcade was massive in filling out the library. I wish console storefronts showed that much curation again instead of scrolling through indie slop, cat jump, horse, jump, hamster jump, cake jump so on and so forth.
 
Probably all being real. Wii did insane hardware numbers but pretty crap software numbers from what I understand. That being said, that's significant penetration in to normie brains for Nintendo.

360, disaster from a hardware perspective but great software in the first half of the gen. Second half tanked the Xbox One though.

PS3, great hardware worth the money but crap software for 3 years after launch. Came back very strong after that though.
 
- Sony: PS3 + PSP + PS Vita + PS Move
- Nintendo: Wii + DSi + 3DS
- Microsoft: Xbox + Kinect

The winner is either Sony or Nintendo
 
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nush said:
Xbox Live Arcade was massive in filling out the library. I wish console storefronts showed that much curation again instead of scrolling through indie slop, cat jump, horse, jump, hamster jump, cake jump so on and so forth.
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You are right. That specific incarnation of Xbox Live Arcade was probably the least shitty. And it was a massive thing for Microsoft, if I remember correctly. They marketed the hell out of it, at least.
 
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German Shocks said:
Not really.

If the PlayStation 3 didn't have Blu-ray, it would've cost $200 less, therefore making it more affordable for more gamers.

The Blu-ray drive in fact hindered Sony's sales during the 7th generation.
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It was the cheapest Blu Ray player on the market which not only got a lot of consoles under non gamers TVs that would eventually buy games because they had the console anyway, but help drive Blu Ray as a media format.
 
360 despite being a piece of overheating shit was a great console. Ps3 I bought at the end of the gen and it was also good for different reasons. I picked 360 because I liked the games better but both were valid.
 
German Shocks said:
Not really.

If the PlayStation 3 didn't have Blu-ray, it would've cost $200 less, therefore making it more affordable for more gamers.

The Blu-ray drive in fact hindered Sony's sales during the 7th generation.
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They reduced the price by 200 euros shortly after launch with the 40GB version. At one point, the PS3 was actually cheaper than the cheapest Blu-ray player on the market, which made it very popular among movie enthusiasts.

Witchilich said:
Cope GIF

You know you can't put Xbox on 1st, so instead put PS3 on 3rd. Let me remind you, in no way the PS3 lost to the Xbox 360.
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KVc4XhyGHDFCqL7V.jpg
 
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You had to own all 3 consoles, Wii was great but it was a novelty, PS3 had great exclusives but was a terrible system, 360 was the place to be especially 2005 to 2010, Halo 3 was as big deal and that system had the best online community going, 1 Vs 100 with you're mates against the rest of the Xbox community and it was a live show with everyone's avatars pissing about the best time in gaming, and I've not even mentioned all the best cods we're on that system.
 
But they were all of them deceived, for another platform was made.
In the land of Washington, in the fires of Mount St. Helens, Lord Gaben openly forged a master Store, to control all others.
 
German Shocks said:
Favorite: PS3

I ended up getting a PS3 about a week after launch and that was only because I knew people. I missed the preorder window that was like... maybe an hour. I worked in Seattle at the time. Every day after launch I went to about 3-4 stores daily. Before the job I had during the preorder window, I worked at an EB Games and knew a few of the managers. I remember going in to a store 6 days after launch and a 360 fanboy was telling me that every PS3 game would also be on 360 so I may as well buy a 360. Had I not known.... had I been a casual gamer, I would have taken his idiotic word as truth cause he's the one working at the game store. Luckily, I've been a gamer probably since before he was born. I laughed at him and came back the next day. I saw the same moron was there and immediately left. I was going up an escalator and a friend of mine was coming down the escalator. Came to find out he was now the manager of that store and he had a PS3 in the store he wasn't supposed to sell till Black Friday, but he would sell it too me if I wanted it. I came back down to the store and bought it with Resistance and an extra controller. The moron behind the counter tried to interject that they weren't supposed to sell it but he couldn't cut off the manager's decision. It was fantastic.

My favorite series, Uncharted, was born on the PS3. I also loved the Infamous games, RE5, Tomb Raider (2013), Mass Effect 2 and 3, and tons of others. It was an incredible generation.

Neutral: X360

I didn't bother owning one but I had a few friends that had it. It was ok but didn't really have the games I wanted to play outside of third party releases that I could also play on PS3.

Loathe: Wii

Don't get me wrong, many Nintendo specific games still had a tinge of fun in them, but I found out with this system that I ABSOLUTELY HATE motion controls. I almost instantly regretted getting rid of my Gamecube. Luckily, my Wii could play Gamecube games so that's basically what it became. Skyward Sword was the nail in the coffin for me and it ruined me on Nintendo as a whole until the Switch advertising came out stating "Play how you want" and showed the Pro controller. After the Wii-U heavily advertised continued use of the Wii-motes, the system was DOA for me.

The only game of note for me was, Xenoblade.
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It is hard to say. Kinect being the vehicle that kept Microsoft financially in the console space for the last two/three years of that gen and cost them the whole of next-gen sort of rules them out, despite gaining tangible market share that gen, and held onto 20% of the gain by the end of the following gen even in spite of them failing to understand where they were at, and what power they had to bring about their negative Xbox One changes to the market.

Wii, well it truly showed that great games sell hardware, even if just a single solitary game. Love it - as it is now in Switch sports - or not, Wii Sports was more than a gimmick, and something I appreciated more last weekend after replacing all those lithium ion batteries in my move controllers and navigator and trying the tennis in (PS Move)Sports Champion - and playing a bit of KZ3 on the shapshooter.
Like Space Invaders, Lunar Lander, Pacman, Marble Madness, Super Mario Bros, Space harrier, Out Run, Afterburner, Virtua Fighter/Tekken 2, ISS Pro Evo, etc, Wii Sports brought something completely new to gaming as the best of its moment - despite the Switch version being the finished article - and on that basis, the Wii is arguably a contender. If not for the huge subsequent failure of the Wii U causing Nintendo to exit full power consoles and combine 3DS and Wii U to make a hybrid: Switch it could have been seen as the victor IMO.

The PS3 lost market share, nearly put PlayStation and Sony in the crapper, cost them ownership of prestigious New York HQ real-estate IIRC and out the gate was late meaning the simple two thread - single core - system with a Nvidia Cg programmable Hdr (10bit) GPU system Sweeney still wrongly gets meme'ed about struggled to convince early adopters with default hdmi playing ports against an Xbox 360 six thread - three core - system with unified memory in its third year - beyond its egregious stutter/tearing 12months luanch on component/DSUB15 launch without hdmi - that this was a premium system worth 3 times the price of the Xbox 360 arcade playing the same games - with the exception of true HDR Assassin Creed 1 at ~20fps on PS3 - that this was the future of gaming.

Naturally the complexity of PS3 meant lazy devs like Valve and most of the industry produced superior frame rates - even with small tearing- on the 360 at nearly 720p res, at close enough visuals, that without PlayStation's first party knocking it out of the park for 5years straight at native 720p lock 30fps/60fps or Wipeout/GT5/GT6 efforts at 1080p vertical the generation could have been completely chalked up as a lost disaster financially and creatively, and in fairness by the end of the gen with MGSV cross gen on PC/360/X1/PS3/PS4 that might have been true, but you only need look at how the first party efforts on PS3 set the narrative for PS4, and how it completely dominated at its launch and is even still used by enough gamers today to only now be losing cross-gen access to GaaS/esports games, that the PS3 like the Wii could be considered the winner even back then, and only confirmed at the winner these years on when the follow up trajectories are factually confirmed.

So, it was PS3 IMO, although I still love Switch Sports and would have traded the whole gen to preserve its invention; especially when you unlock the ability to play the best AI players Reggie/Eliza (IIRC) where blocking their smash winners by cushioned reflex shot is like deflecting a sabre hit from Vader and gaming at its very finest IMHO....maybe it was Wii :)
 
Let's see how many sales... Wii

And with games... Mario Kart Wii sold more than Halo 3, 4, Uncharted 1, 2 and 3 combined, and costed less to produce so it was more profit by design

Little bonus: Nintendo DS sold so much that Sony released a memo with the number of produced (not sold) PS2 units
 
This was the last console generation where every console was worth owning.

Xbox 360 gave you the ultimate Chud/Dude Bro multiplayer experience, PS3 gave you awesome Japanese centric games, Wii gave you great family friendly party games.

Back then you got 3 great games every month, now you're lucky to get 3 per year, how the times have changed...
 
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Didn't Sony try and pivot to motion gaming with the Move and Kinect to compete for the casual family audience against Nintendo?

For sales the Wii won for sure, the system definitely has some great niche games but I'd have a hard time wanting to revisit them now.

PS3 was honestly kinda meh until around 2009, by 2012 I jumped off the Xbox and have riding it out with Sony from 2012 to now.
 
Technically the momentum Xbox gained from 360 was unmatched but Microsoft fucked it all up with Xbox one .
For online play 360 was the console to get halos gears forzas all the cods were peak back than
 
Depends on the criteria for "winning".

Nintendo Wii had the most hardware sales. Xbox 360 was the only time the platform was firing on all cylinders and a significant contender. PlayStation 3 opened with a disastrous launch but had the best turnaround seen, transforming the console from a laughingstock to a powerhouse.

I would argue the real winner was the PS3. While its sales were less than Wii, the PS3 helped position the PS4 to become the complete dominator tbat it was, in one of the most important generations of gaming.

Xbox squandered the trust and good will it had built with the 360 on the XB1, while Nintendo cratered the market they had created and nurtured with Wii into a complete failure with the WiiU. It took them several years to recover with the Switch. Xbox never recovered from the XB1. The console's unveiling was a mortal wound to the brand and ever since it's been slowly bleeding out.
 
Owned all three, four with gaming PC.

Best console multiplatforms, until the very last years at least, 360 by a mile.
BioShock was so mindblowing to me at the time. But Gears as well, just a little less as I had already played the full game at a friend's house on a CRT. Enjoyed Alan Wake and American Nightmare, Mass Effect, loved Forza Horizon to death, best versions of masterpieces like Red Dead Redemption and games I've spent probably thousands of hours into like Resident Evil 5.

PS3 exclusives were, and still are, among my favorite games of all time. It honestly feels impossible to think I share the same hobby with people who haven't played Uncharted (2007), Killzone 2 (start of 2009), Uncharted 2 (2009), God of War III (2010), Uncharted 3 (2011) and The Last of Us (2013) at the time of release. With MGS4, Little Big Planet, Infamous, MotorStorm, GT5 and much more in between.

PC got me by the balls with 1080p and the mindblowing PhysX improvements to the Arkham games, and then led me to discover Crysis, which fried my brain, and the wonderful world of mods and emulation.

Wii was used an awful lot to play with friends, even got me quite a bit of money thanks to bets on Wii Sports. But it never replaced my beloved GameCube Resident Evil machine.

All of those played on Pioneer Kuro. Magical times.

Hard to pick a winner, but has to be PS3 for me. It was used as a BD player for so many years, it had incredible audio, a flawless XMB.. but above all, simply because those games stayed with me. And what those devs were able to accomplish later on was so above the competition it was mindblowing to witness.
 
Nintendo Playground wasn't really a console like the other two

It was a GameCube with motion controls = a gimmick

PS3 changed my life with HD video in 2007 (Blu-ray player built-in for $600 vs $1000 for stand-alone players) and then again with the top games of the generation in the second half of its lifecycle
 
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The 7th Generation of Consoles was the last generation where I bought all three consoles

If I had to rank my favorite consoles it would be XBOX 360 > Playstation 3 > Nintendo Wii

It's pretty interesting to me how with the 8th Generation, I stopped buying all three consoles, I lost interest towards purchasing Microsoft consoles starting with the Xbox One. With Playstation it's the Playstation 5. I think Switch 2 might be the last console I buy since gaming hasn't been as interesing to me nowadays. I factor it to my age and not liking the direction gaming is going

I like to play older games nowadays since I find them much more fun

But who won the 7th Generation? Wii by mile but that's because Nintendo aimed at a different crowd but in the long run, that crowd are now mostly mobile gamers
 
nush said:
It was the cheapest Blu Ray player on the market which not only got a lot of consoles under non gamers TVs that would eventually buy games because they had the console anyway, but help drive Blu Ray as a media format.
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The original fat PS3 is probably the greatest multimedia machine Sony ever made

It played basically every media format ever created except DVD-Audio and had the PS2 hardware inside for perfect backwards compatibility

The XMB user interface is still unmatched 20 years later. I would pay to have that back
 
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  • Sales winner: Wii
  • Online/cultural peak for hardcore gaming: Xbox 360
  • Late-generation comeback + strongest exclusives: PS3
I had a problem with motion controls and basically played the game cube version of Twilight Princess.

PS3, and 360 had similar paths, I flipped flopped between the two, many like me got criticism for this.

PSN felt fake compared to Xbox Live but had novelties like the text chat, the ps home madness.
 
ShadyAcshuns said:
Imagine admitting you only played ps3 that gen. All three systems offered something great.

It was a great time to be a gamer.
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For me it was the lack of Japanese games on consoles is the main reason why I'm not as into the 7th Generation as much as I am into the 5th/6th Generation. I did love Fables, Mass Effect Trilogy and a few other Western games but whatever Japanese game that was released on the consoles tended to be not as good and lot of the Japanese developers ended up developing for DS/PSP. Back than I wasn't a portable guy due to the screen size and resolution. It's actually amazing how much DS library reminds me of the PS2 library. Most of the games you still can't find anywhere else and there was a good variety of games in each genre. There were some bangers on consoles like Nino Kuni, Xenoblade Chronicles etc but it was noticiable less than the previous two generations
 
I voted PlayStation 3, but it really was a toss-up between PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360.

Nintendo Wii had the most consoles sold, but they had the least amount of software sold despite selling the most consoles. PlayStation 3 had slightly more consoles sold than Xbox 360, but Xbox 360 had slightly more software sold than PlayStation 3.

My reasoning for picking PlayStation 3 over Xbox 360 came down to personal preference; I liked the PlayStation console and ecosystem better than the Xbox at the time, even though I had both consoles and played the crap out of both systems.

For this generation, while PlayStation 5 absolutely pantsed Xbox Series, that was solely caused by the idiots in charge of managing Xbox, not the actual device itself. I actually preferred the Xbox Series X to the PlayStation 5 this generation, but Microsoft mishandled Xbox so badly throughout the entire generation that it rendered my preference moot.
 
Sony.

Part of my criteria depends on if the platform holder set themselves up well for the generation to follow. Out of the three, and at least up to 8th gen, only Sony/SIE managed to accomplish that (home console-wise, I'd argue Nintendo also did from NES to SNES). PS3 might've had a nightmarish 2006 - 2008 period, struggling to match 360 in 3P performance and getting its back blown out in the UK & US (which never got much better over the course of the gen, TBF), but they made almost all the right moves from 2009-onwards to recover market share and rebuild faith in the brand (and company as a whole).

The recovery Sony made with PS3 from 2009 - 2013 needs to be studied, because it's arguably the single-greatest recovery of a games company in the industry from a point of near-death to re-establishing themselves as a dominant force. I'd argue Nintendo's recovery from the GameCube to Wii or Wii U to Switch is a good 2nd, but Nintendo were never in danger of "going under" regardless how poorly GameCube and Wii U performed, and they had the Gameboy Advance, DS, and 3DS during those dark times to buffer them. Sony technically had late-era PS2 (in developing markets) and PSP during the rough PS3 years, but neither provided the revenue or profits to offset the losses PS3 incurred at the time.

Sony's entire corporate structure was in jeopardy of collapse that gen, and it's rather miraculous they salvaged as much as they did. If modern Sony were in a similar position, I don't think they'd be able to have near the same level of recovery TBH; some of that is due to external market factors different today vs. the 2000s, but a good chunk of it is also due to the difference in leadership and corporate mentality (from what I can observe) versus back then.

I'd also say investor/shareholder-wise they're probably too compromised by individuals who also hold shares in supposed rivals like Microsoft, ensuring Sony'd never be able to make business decisions that could truly threaten or endanger a competitor like Microsoft in the gaming market (the shareholders/investors with investments in both wouldn't want their money in either being jeopardized), but that starts to get into a different conversation. Maybe a more contentious one, I'm sure, but that's how I feel ATM.
 
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Highest highs: Wii. Mario Galaxies, No More Heroes, Harvey Birdman Attorney at Law. But lots of trash too.

Most hitters: 360. Lots of great stuff through the gen until the purple cases started popping up

Most stolen games: PS3. Once I got multiman rolling, I stole everything I could
 
Wii was the top for me, by far. It's a system that I've regularly kept hooked up and that I'll go back to and play games on, and where I'm continuing to discover new stuff that I hadn't played at the time. I'm not big on motion controls, though some games do really cool stuff with it, and that's actually something I've gained appreciation for over time. I never liked Wii Sports, for example, but I can see how games like No More Heroes and Madworld benefit massively from the occasional bit of waggle. If you're into niche games, in particular, there was a ton of cool stuff to explore - this really was the last hurrah for the PS2-era style of game design.

The 360 I'm kinda coming around to. Both that and the PS3 had shit hardware that wasn't up to snuff for HD games, but there are still some gems, and there are some cool games that I've been discovering since I bought a new console last year. It's definitely not a great platform, particularly if you've got access to a properly specced PC, but there are some high points.

The PS3 just sucked. Games were rarely optimized to an acceptable degree, Sony's first-party output was absolute dog shit, the Japanese developers couldn't seem to make a game to save their life anymore... the system was basically just a worse 360. I guess it had MGS4.


I always felt like Gen 7 was the beginning of the end in a lot of ways - purely in terms of good games, it was a massive step back from the gen before it. The Wii is the only one of those systems that I have any real enthusiasm for these days, so... that's my winner.
 
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