NPD December 2007
- Thread starter RobertR1
- Start date
Post 1, first line.
It's also fun to see France being the poster child for PS3 fans when Canada with similar numbers is ignored.
Laa-Yosh is asking for UK data.
Non-factor? The 360 does better over in the EU then the PS3 does in the US and the 360 still has a bigger userbase in the EU.
MGS4, Yakuza 3 and FF are franchises with a global presence. Nevertheless even the PS3 userbase (~1.5 million?) in japan isn't worth writing home about. The japanese market is the last place Konami, Sega and Square is going to use to determine console preference as less than 10% of the PS3/360 userbase is located in japan.
No proof, but surely work on the game engine would have started.
Anyway, my point is that I've been frustrated by the wait for AAA exclusives, and I'm guessing there are a good few other PS3 owners who feel the same way. Uncharted is very good, but I'm wasnt that interested in R&C/Warhawk. Still, I have higher hopes for 2008.
But these games arent coming to 360. All of these games would have the potential to go platinum in Japan given their respective histories, IF the 360 was selling relatively well there since 2005.
Their respective histories dealt with a console that sold 1 million on launch day and ended up with a userbase of 20 million in japan. Nevertheless, these titles weren't just intended for the japan market but the market as a whole (this statement might not be true for yakuza).
Even, if these titles sold 22 copies between the three of them in japan, they would have still been successful titles due to sales in the rest of the markets (again, I might be mistaken about Y3 as I have no idea what it sold outside of japan).
If Konami, Sega and Square were to invest in a major high budget IP today with a intention of maximizing sales globally, then these new IPs would more than likely end up multiplatform.
This is at best your own opinion. At worst it is just plain wrong. The reason is simple - those are franchises that have been owned and produced on Nintendo consoles.
The type of sale you are refering too here entirely consists of people buying sequals. People who owned the PS2 would be irrelevant to this discussion. Instead you would be referring to people who owned the earlier versions of Nintendo hardware. Indeed, most of those probably did go with the Wii. Given the state of Nintendo's last released console, brand loyalty would have been very important to people who stuck it through with the gamecube.
Moreover, given the small number of games that were available on the Wii, it stands to reason that people buying the console have to buy something. Do you suppose they would refuse to buy these games? There is no reason behind that assumption.
At best you could claim that those sales were made up of older Nintendo fans who had purchased a PS2 and were now going back to the Nintendo after a full generation. Even then, look at the install bases of the original Nintendo. The N64 sold around 32 million units. That is no where near the number of people needed to support the current sales rate of current consoles - especially the Wii.
I have a feeling that millions of people who bought Super Mario Galaxy, Metroid, and Zelda would agree with me entirely.
Converted to gaming is the wrong term. If you check anywhere from 40% (Washington Post) to 63% (NPD) of the US population plays video games. There are 300 million people in the US with an average household size of 2.6 last I checked. That means there are around 115 million households in the US, with anywhere from 46 to 72 million households that are already playing some form of computer games. Last I checked, only around 40% of US households own consoles. That means there are around 30 million households in the US who play computer games who do not own a console.
So that means the Wii by aiming for households who did not own consoles was aiming at a market that has nearly 69 million people in it who did not have a PS2 - 30 million of which already played video games. Yes, there will be some overlap as well. However like I have said before everything I have seen does not support the fact that the PS2 userbase is going over to the Wii in droves. As a matter of fact it is just the opposite. PS2 sales remain strong. PS3 and XBox sales look similar to uptake of previous consoles. If the Wii was competing for the same market, it wouldn't be selling at all according to those numbers.
So the only explanation left as to why it is selling so well is its extended market appeal. Don't laugh that off or try to explain it away. It is the strongest thing the Wii has going for it right now. It does not lessen the Wii's success at all, quite the opposite as a matter of fact. The fact that the Wii has managed to broaden the market is a good thing. The days of video gamers being a few teenage men slumped over a glowing green monitor in their basement are over.
Irrelevant entirely to what I said.
Let me explain though as you seem to have missed the point. Last year, a multitude of people ran around claiming that HD DVD was winning because it was selling more stand alone players. As a matter of fact, HD DVD sold more stand alone players throughout most of last year. Blu Ray only caught up in the last couple of months.
However, Blu Ray sold discs at a rate of 2:1 up to 4:1 at times. Now, you can try to throw arround attach ratios all you want, but the math is very very simple here:
People who own PS3s were buying Blu Rays.
End of story. Not only were they buying Blu Rays, but they were doing so at a rate far above what the other HD competition was able to produce. Attach ratio does not mean anything when it comes to Blu Rays. It does with video games, but for very different reasons. Lets review them just for good measure.
As late as November of last year, studies show that only around 25% of US households own HD televisions. Don't confuse HD with Digital - people who buy Blu Ray certainly don't. So, using the earlier numbers for households, there are only around 25 million households that own HD televisions and to whom Blu Ray or HD DVD could be important too. Last figures I saw, total HD DVD and stand alone Blu Ray players is reaching maybe 1.2 million. Of those, the lions share were stand alone HD DVD players at around 750,000 (once again, how are Blu Ray discs outselling HD DVD if no one cares about the Blu Ray in the PS3? Especially by such a large margin?). Include December sales and the PS3 total sales and you might get up to around 5 million total players sold.
So lets reveiw attach rate for households who can watch HD signals and those who have players. Lets see - about 1 in 5! What an amazing coincidence! Well, actually it isn't. As many analysts have stated the entire year, people are holding off on choosing an HD format right now because of confusion surrounding the format war. It isn't that they don't care, it is that they are waiting to see which format prevails. Even those who buy PS3s end up reluctant to start replacing their DVD collection with Blu Ray discs. Even a chance that such a costly endevour could leave them with a collection of unplayable discs is not worth the chance.
Also some things you claimed need to be clarified. Currently, the PS3 can indeed stream downloaded movies from a PC. It can also download its own if you have linux. What the PS3 does not currently support is bittorrent (hence no illegal downloads) and a few of the online download shops like netflix that require their own proprietary format. Sony and Microsoft are both working on getting digital movies available in their online stores. By the time download or streaming technologies become relevant to mass markets, both consoles will have the ability.
Like I said before, it is a gamble with technology. To just dismiss it as the wrong choice now is very short sighted. It would be the same for those who want to claim the Wii is just a fad and will fail. Both are building their intended markets and are on track. Why try so hard to prove that one is not?
Most people in the EU market understands English, and quite a lot of games are not driven by dialogue anyway.
You may be surprised to find out how few games that are actually localized beyond the menues.
The Killzone 2 development started out on PC hardware in the fall of 2004, I can´t find a link now, but I remember reading dev comments about how they started before Cell based kits were available.
I would be very surprised if it is not released in 2008.
The crippled wii online functionality is unlikely to change. Games like gta do have an influence on casuals, not everyone buys it but a large number of casuals do play it(shared, rented, etc). Casuals will take note of the lack of games like gta on wii throughout this year. A price cut for either ps3 or 360 is likely, imo too.
When the ps2 was in the 200s the gamecube died even going to 99 did not save it, iirc. It is my belief that the same will likely happen to the wii at least in the US and europe once ps3 and 360 are at a reasonable price.
There simply would be no reason to buy a wii this year for casuals, if the price of the other two was made reasonable. online, third party games, graphics, dvd and bluray functionality.
iceberg187
Regular
quest55720
Regular
Wii Fit will be a monster I warn you now. Also I am sure Wii sports 2 is only a matter of time. Add in mario cart and super smash brothers and you have people waiting in line to get a system the rest of the year. That and the original Wii sports is still the killer app of this generation.
The demand for the Wii is hardly satisfied right now. I don't see the end of Wii shortages for a long time until Nintendo gets supply way way up.
scooby_dooby
Legend
scooby_dooby
Legend
Which used to be spring IIRC.
Well, obvious the shrinking sales in Japan for traditional franchises is a major factor.
Virtually every single major japanese publisher has expressed their desire to increase western marketshare.
The reverse is not true with regards to western publishers, and Japan.
About 80% of PS2 owners have not bought GTA. That's quite the majority if you ask me, and we could add a lot of Xbox and GC users on top of that.
Once again, people should realise that the market isn't homogeneous, none of the user bases are. The current X360 owners are the closest, after all half of them has bought Halo3; but even there's some variance.
PS2 had many different kinds of owners, and it is perfectly reasonable to conclude that quite a lot of them find the Wii attractive.
They go to even further lengths; Namco has financed an MMO and a fantasy RTS among other games, Square has expressed interest in buying western game developer studios, and the list goes on. Japanese developers are in trouble and they know it.
Is that the game that comes packaged or bundled with the wii? If so, from anecdotal experience that is nothing more than a gimmicky pos* that is played for a few minutes to a couple of hours and forgotten.
Rentals, sharing and similar things extend the number of gta players on the console beyond the sold numbers(do those numbers include used games sales? Because those are significant for a game like gta considering recent policies at stores like gs and eb.). Also I said games like gta, gta is not the only third party title that will be missing from wii this year.
*piece of software