Nah, the numbers RobertR1 posted are likely close to correct.
There are people at GAF who get the NPD data, and they have hinted around at the totals. One of them said the Wii+PS3 was "over 340k", and said the 192k PS3 number was "about right" (and the Wii has whats left).
And Wii was stuck at $250 with systems flying off the shelves for years. Until 2010 when they dropped the price multiple times to end the year at $170 with new game bundles.
Result: yoy sales decline in December from 3.81m to 2.36m.
Following year (2011) price cuts to end the year with $99 multiple game bundles.
Result: yoy sales decline in December from 2.36m to less than half that at 1.06m.
Sales only work as long as people are still interested in the product. That's why it's important not to lose momentum.
What is even more important than momentum is profit. I think Nintendo has nothing to be ashamed of there. The big question is how well the Wii U will do, because as everyone now knows there are no guarantees. Initially in terms of third party support they will be fine though. For the next 3 years their platform will be easy to port current gen games to, and it may take MS and Sony long enough to allow Nintendo another good cycle of profitabily.
This could be the one reason MS would jump the next-gen gun - to head off Nintendo.
This could be the one reason MS would jump the next-gen gun - to head off Nintendo.
Momentum leads to profit.
As to Nintendo feeling ashamed, they should feel ashamed that they didn't invest that profit to provide a suitable roadmap for their future.
WiiU has fail written all over it as it does not build on the foundation that they built with Wii. The moment Wii was shipped and started seeing great acceptance, Nintendo should have been researching the path forward. They should have made a deal with Prime Sense to acquire that tech for THEIR purposes as it was the next direct evolution of the interface they pioneered. Or at the very least, come up with their own version of the Move.
That's where they should feel shame.
Instead, they've decided to try and blend a home console and a portable with the advantages of neither.
Their future sales will show this to be the case.
Okay, Wii's sales are dropping now that they're approaching 100 million console. Boo-hoo, how tragic. If only they had sold less to begin with so they could show better sales later on.
Healthy profit margins leads to profit. It's better to sell 50 milion consoles at $200 proft a piece than get steady growth up to 100 million consoles with narrow margins. All Wii shows is that the people who were willing to buy a $99 Wii were also willing to buy a $250 Wii. They approached saturation more quickly, rather than dragging out adoption. They just compressed the sales curved over a shorter period, as if PS2's lifespan had occured over 5 years total. Wii was a fabulous success. Nintendo don't appear to have a strong follow-up, but they have one at a good time. There's nothing anyone can really take away from Wii other than 'it didn't offer the experience I wanted'. It gave lots of people lots of fun and made Nintendo crazy amounts of money.
Indeed.
But how many PS2's sold into the wild? Somewhere in the neighborhood of 150million. So that's 150million people interested in console gaming. Note, this doesn't count the many moms, grandmothers, and other casuals that bought into Wii that had nothing to do with consoles prior.
So Wii sitting at less than 100million means quite a few (>50million) regular gamers chose not to buy in.
And as the low $99 bundle is showing, price isn't the reason.
In other words, just because something is cheaper does not mean it will lead to more sales. When a product sits on the shelf long enough, people know what it is and either decide they want it and will buy it at x price, or they decide they don't want it and move on.
Momentum.
Wii lost it earlier than PS2 did because their hardware was outdated the moment it launched. That's why those >50 million gamers said no thanks. Nintendo could have done as I said, researched the logical progression of their concept, and threw the profits from Wii into developing the successor and launched 5 years after Wii launch (fall 2011). That would have been taking advantage of the momentum and profit they had, and put it to work for future profits.
It would have sold gangbusters and again, momentum would be leading to profits.
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The xb360/ps3 generation also does not have that much steam left in it. They can milk out a few more sales with another price cut this year, but the product has been available for a good long while now and with good exposure.
There are still some stragglers that bought into Wii and are looking to upgrade from that console in which case Kinect/Move is a good draw, but traditional gamers either already have a ps3/xb360 or decided they aren't interested.
Getting into the $99 range will bring the last hurrah of some ps3/xb360 gamers buying into the opposition (xb360/ps3) to see what they've missed out on for the exclusives, but after that, the sales will come to a crawl.
Doing things like a smaller box with better interface (Kinect2/Move2) will help to push further into the casual market snatching up old Wii players, but it does nothing for the core gamers.
Sony and more specifically MS need to be well on their way to not let momentum shift outside of their garden and into other mediums.
But it also was more profitable as a result. Had Nintendo stuck in better hardware, it'd have made them no money the first 30 million units sold, and then dribs and drabs with perhaps a $50 profit margin between pricedrops.
As such, those 50 million gamers would have probably cost Nintenod a couple of billion. There's also good reason to think the control scheme wouldn't have worked with them either, so even if Wii's power was as beyond PS360 level, it may well have not had the core-gamer support due to a lack of a dual-stick controller.
Man, yeah. Nintendo should really have paid more attention to MS and Sony. They know how to turn a profit from forward thinking hardware in a way Nintendo could never do. Hasn't their net takings over past ten years in this business been something like $0 each?
Hmm. Where do you get your financial reports from? You seem very well informed as to who's buying what consoles. I'd have thought that the records of Wii owners buying PS3 or 360 would be hard to come by, but I guess you have access to something like Gamestop figures that show Wii customers now bying PS360s?
Make fun all you want, Nintendo won't be laughing 5 years from now.
That's because of their new hardware choices. I don't think Wuu will be successful. That doesn't take anything away from Wii or your argument though. When it came to making a profit, Nintendo showed the rest of the world what it's about. Whatever grand scheme MS and Sony may have had regards momentum and stuff, it's Nintendo who actually made money, making your argument pretty ridiculous.
"MS = $0, Sony = $0, Nintendo = $10,000,000,000, but Nintendo had it all wrong"
Momentum does not lead to profits. You need an all-round business strategy that has the right product at the right price with the right opportunities to milk the users for ongoing revenues, whether that's game sales or peripherals or download content or merchandise. Momentum can help with isntall base and selling more content to more people, but that doesn't guarantee profits. Hell, it can even be a route to bankruptcy if you're subsidizing the hardware to help keep up momentum.
"MS = $0, Sony = $0, Nintendo = $10,000,000,000, but Nintendo had it all wrong"
Momentum does not lead to profits. You need an all-round business strategy that has the right product at the right price with the right opportunities to milk the users for ongoing revenues, whether that's game sales or peripherals or download content or merchandise. Momentum can help with isntall base and selling more content to more people, but that doesn't guarantee profits. Hell, it can even be a route to bankruptcy if you're subsidizing the hardware to help keep up momentum.
And there it is in a nutshell.
Lost momentum leads to these consumers going elsewhere and any opportunity of influencing them for further purchases is out the window too.
That is the boat Nintendo finds themselves in today.
So yeah they had a great run selling plastic and old hardware. Hurray to the geniuses!
You know who else made a ton? The guy that invented the pet rock.
One-off successes aren't all that rare, it's the ones that can sustain ... wait for it ... momentum.
Uh, yeah. Why not ignore the rest of the post.
What good has momentum done MS and Sony for their bottom line, versus Nintendo?
Have you seen how much MS is making in XBL subs?
40 million at $50/yr ... I'll let you do the math.
And that's not counting the licensing fees on games as the system is still popular, games are still bought for it.
And of course their cut on DLC, movies, music, and they've barely scratched the surface on potential ad revenue.
Didn't they have a large shortage of Wii's in the first couple of years anyway? Had they installed better hardware and priced it at $299 the street price wouldn't have looked significantly different in the end and they likely wouldn't have made or lost any more money on the front end but the back end ought to have seen much better take up by third parties for the purposes of cross platform compatibility.
Would it have really killed their profitability to go with a dual core CPU with double the RAM and a relatively modern albeit gimped GPU which we'd have still been complaining about to this day? The street price says no and in the back end they'd have likely been able to maintain their pricing. Even producing something akin to HD level visuals at 480P ought to have been enough.
I honestly see no problem for either of them selling 50million more consoles after they launch the successors. So they will both catch up to Wii when all is said and done.
No 3rd party publishers can afford to jump straight in to building next-gen games ONLY because the bases will be so small compared to current-gen. Current-gen versions will outsell next-gen counterparts for a long time. I predict it will be pretty hard to drag the mainstream audience that bankrolls these games away from current-gen because the difference will be too small or machines too expensive
Next-gen will look pretty much like enhanced ports outside of exclusive games from 1st parties. It will be on year two or three before you see any real huge games from 3rd parties.
The reason Sony/MS are not worried at all about the Wii U even having huge lead when they launch in late 2013/2014 is because they know Wii U is not going bring the real next-gen for publishers. Wii U will never be the "PS2" because the jump just isnt enough from 360 to become a new lead platform
They actually might see Wii U just helping them to sustain this generation even longer..
I can definitely see Nintendo hoping this to be the case.
However, like I said, sales of HD consoles are already softening. And this, with new motion controls available.
While I fully expect the handful of pillar titles (COD, BF, etc) to continue to sell relatively well, overall the market is tiring of this generation.
Lack of consideration for this will lead to many of them leaving the ecosystems Sony and MS worked so hard to create.
I'm not disagreeing per se but a couple notes
As of the last few quarters and maybe 1-2 years, the most profitable gaming company is Microsoft (was going to say "only", but Sony might be currently profitable too dont know). Sure there's the past and the future, but there's also the present, and in the present it seems like Microsoft is the one cultivating a profit machine.
Second, only with the Wii did Nintendo go the low power/gimmick route. N64, SNES, Gamecube, NES they did not. So it doesn't correlate with their profitability entirely.
For the whole generation so far, you'd rather have the Wii. But right now, you'd rather have the 360. When all is said and done, it's possible you might have rather had the 360, too (it's most likely going to end up #1 in the USA for this gen, and possibly even the world).
Maybe "OT" but NPD threads tend to turn into business discussions anyway, but I started wondering, why does a generation have to "end"?
Why would new hardware of itself stimulate sales? It's a bit odd.
You can say, the current gen gets "old". But aren't there always new kids growing up, (say from 9 when the gen started to 15 now) to whom the generation is not "old"? Wouldn't there be enough of those kids to maintain sales, forever? (This assumes of course, the absence of next gen competition, which is what ends prior generations without question, lets say for this exercise no next gen machine ever comes into being).
How about this, would DVD sales have maintained forever, if digital had never existed, and Blu Ray (or any "superior format) had never come along, or would they have inevitably declined, simply because the hardware and format was "old"? Wasn't DVD declining before Blu Ray came along?
Indeed... at the point of hardware sales decline, I would think you'd have the highest amount of potential software consumption (far more lucrative than a new loss leading hardware launch). I would launch when the software sales numbers begin to decline. How have the Wii software sales looked in the last couple years?
It's been said lots of times in other threads, but MS ditched X1 for obvious strategic and economical reasons. Sony would have preferred to launch later than it did, and we know PS2 sales were still fairly strong in 2007 I believe.