On June 6th, 2002,
Nintendo announced that they will sell 50 million Gamecubes worldwide by March 2005. By the end of last year, their total sales number were
18 million units. This is how sales in US looked since then (this year):
Code:
System PS2 Xbox GC
Jan 488,000 241,000 114,000
Feb 533,000 212,000 116,000
Mar 620,000 227,000 94,000
Apr 332,000 153,000 63,000
Total 1,973,000 833,000 387,000
Nintendo would have had to sell quite a few consoles everywhere else since then to regain the second place. Why regain, you might ask? Because though December, MS
has sold 19.9 million Xbox units would-wide. For those keeping score at home, that's almost 2 million, or 10% more then Nintendo, over the same period of time. In Europe, they sold 5 million units. Nintendo doesn't report European sales specifically, designating everything outside of Japan and Americans as "others" - but even that figure, bound to include European, Australian and non-Japanese Asian sales, was 4.13 million. In other words, its advantage in Japan is not longer enough to offset the shortfall everyone else, thus dropping them into the third place. I think we can thus readily dismiss "Nintendo is #3 only in US" theory. It is also quite telling that April-December sales in 2004 are down in every territory from the same period in 2003 - GC sales have actually decreases 22% year to year! No wonder Nintendo
blamed poor GC sales for the 43% profit plunge and cut shipping targets ever further.
There is more. As mentioned in the immortal
"Top-20 analogy"GC software sales lately have been as dismal as hardware. And of course Nintendo's
DK Jungle Beat bombed hard. But hey, maybe it's only one game? Well, in addition to
Metroid: Echoes lagging behind Prime sales despite a wider installment base, there is this said statistic:
in March Gamecube's 5 top-selling games sold a combined total of
254,400 copies. By comparison, the top-selling game on Xbox sold 215K copies by itself, while the top-5 accounted for
952,258 copies sold.
In conclusion, Gamecube is now solidly in third place globally, miles behind Nintendo's original projection, increasingly lagging behind the competing, is actually dropping in sales each year, not moving software and is blamed by Nintendo itself for their profits shortfall. Now, if any rational person (that would exclude PC Engine) can explain to me how all of this can be considered as "doing fine", please be my guest.
