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Erik Aston said: I feel like people are missing several things... 1. Videogames are a momentum based industry. Sales breeds support, and support breeds sales. If you have neither, you have to do something to break into the cycle. Even if its a "gimmick", if it gets you sales, then it will get you more support, which will get you more sales. If you have both, but due to a higher price tag are losing sales, or due to longer development times and higher costs are losing support, you are in danger of this becoming a continuing cycle of less sales meaning less support and less support meaning less sales. This can happen regardless of what your competition does, but can be acclerated if they are moving in the opposite direction. Even at some point in the future, if no console has a price advantage, and no console is cheaper to develop for, the console with the momentum will keep gaining momentum. 2. The videogame market is currently very small. Less than 40% of homes have home consoles in the three major markets for them. Oftentimes, most people in a home with a console don't play the console. It is because of the content and gameplay of games that only the 14-34 male demographic buys so many games. If the content and gameplay changes, and appeals to a different demo, they WILL buy games. We see this time and again, with the DS being the biggest example. With 20/20 hindsight people say "of course girls and older people will play portable gaming systems", but we didn't know that 3 years ago. And early home games like Pong appealed to everyone; slowly that universal appeal was lost. Nintendo mostly appealed to little kids, and PlayStation increasingly only appeals to teens and twenty-something males. Increasing the cost of gaming while not expanding the demos aimed at will result in less sales than previous generations, like the pre-DS shrinking Japanese market. 3. There is no such thing as a "strong industry" or a "strong company" but only strong business plans. In videogames, there is even no such thing as a "strong hardware brand." Only strong business plans. Despite people's insistence in saying "Nintendo always owned the handheld market," if Sony had approached making their handheld the way Nintendo did, coming up with something which created a better user experience and would encourage the development of new types of games for new audiences, while Nintendo had Sony's approach, focusing on system power, storage space and multi-media functionality, Sony would be winning that war. When talking about the home consoles, some people say that yes, Sony has made awful moves, and yes, Nintendo has made great moves, but the strength of the Sony brand, and their past ability to garner support and sales will eventually catch up to them. Well, theres nothing that says it will. The plan behind the Wii is not so unlike what was behind the PSone or the DS or the iPod for that matter.
Well… I differ with point 3. I think that is a “strong hardware”, remember that Commodore and Amstrad launched each one a console based on their old personal computers from 8-bits in early 90' (a suicide). PD: Ironic whit Wii.