Keep in mind that those are probably world-wide sales. XBoxes (both original and 360) sold much better in Western (specifically American) markets, so although they appeared to dominate the market from our perspective, they actually ran neck-and-neck with PS3 worldwide. As for Nintendo, they're pursuing a radically different business model wherein they make much more profit per unit sold, so they can get by with many fewer units sold overall than either XBox or PS.

The NES absolutely dominated the video game industry like no console before or since (its market share was in the high 80%'s for several years) but the consumer base for games was much smaller at the time, so by modern standards its sales numbers aren't all that huge.

This just reminds me of the Wizard. Remember how at the end of that movie, the little autistic kid thinks he's going to do the championship competition on a game he's practiced before, but then the announcer is like "FUCK YOU, WE'RE MAKING YOU PLAY SUPER MARIO BROS 3, A GAME THAT ISN'T EVEN OUT YET, SO YOU WON'T HAVE ANY IDEA WHAT YOU'RE DOING!"

I kind of want that to happen in a real esports competition. Like, have the Overwatch world championship match stop five minutes in, and then everyone's console reboots and suddenly it's running a copy of Overwatch 2, which no one even knew existed, and all the characters are brand new and assigned to each player at random, and whichever team wins the match gets the million dollars and saves their parents' marriage. People would have seizures, it would be great.

PS3s were also bought in mass quantities for non-gaming processing clusters. I don't know how much of an impact that would make on the total sales figures. I remember in astroparticle physics some of the heavy numerical stuff was done on PS3 clusters.

i had the opposite experience - i knew a couple people who owned a ps3 and one guy with a 360 - but between the system's popularity and people having to buy replacements, i also would have expected the 360 to have outsold the ps3, too

The closest I've seen is with the new Soul Caliber game. It's not out yet but they are introducing it in exhibition tournaments for other games, as a kind of side-show tournament. It's really refreshing to watch pro level players who don't know the game yet just playing and having fun with it.

I don't know if anyones marriages are at stake though, at least not more than usual.

Mario kind of looks like the lady in the radiator from Eraserhead.