Why the Wii Won't sell 80m+

[mrstickball]

HappySqurriel said: A few things to consider ... The top 5 best selling systems of all time are: Gameboy (Nintendo) 118,690,000 Playstation 2 (Sony) 111,250,000 Playstation (Sony) 102,490,000 Gameboy Advance (Nintendo) 76.77 Nintendo Entertainment System (Nintendo) 61.79 Your comment on Nintendo systems selling poorly after their replacement showed up is incorrect as the SNES and Gameboy sold 10 Million units after their follow up appeared, and the Gameboy advance has sold nearly 20 Million units since the launch of the Nintendo DS.

I am reffering to consoles, not handhelds. There are different rates for both. The N64/GC are very good examples of it. The N64 sold 800k in 2000, then dropped to 155k when the GC launched. The GC went from 633k to 233k when the Wii launched (vs. previous year). Therefore both systems dropped roughly 66% or more when the new CONSOLE came out. The PS1 went from 1m to 760k when the PS2 launched. The PS2 went from 1,761k to 1701k when the PS3 launched - around an average of 13%. Thats a rate of 5 times LESS versus Nintendo systems. A stark contrast.

Your 1 Million per month estimate negates the boost that all systems get at holiday periods, the Nintendo DS sold (roughly) 5 Million units in North America and Japan in November and December of 2006 and (as a rough guestimate) probably 7 to 8 Million units world wide in that time frame.

System SALES get a boost, but MANUFACTURING does not increase to a proportinate percentage. Typically, you will see every manufacturer cut shipping of units 3 to 6 months prior to the holidays, to build a sizeable inventory for the holidays. Consider the 360: In the quarter before the holiday period, MS shipped LESS than 1m units in 3 months. In the holiday quarter, they increased shipping to reflect the fact that they stored many systems back (they shipped around 4.4m in the holiday quarter, FYI).

Basically, if you're able to average 1.2 Million units a month outside of the holiday season and 8 Million units in the holiday season you'll sell 20 Million units in a year; if you can do that for 5 years you break 100 Million units.

Exactly how can Nintendo magically increase their production capacities by 400% for only 1-2 months? These factories are already running nearly 24/7. They would have to somehow either buy/aquire factories for just a month or two, which is not financially feasable. Again, as I stated, this is why companies lower their Q3 and even Q2 shipments to prepare for the mass sales in the holidays.

Now, the reason I wouldn't expect Nintendo to break 100,000 units is that you could claim that the only systems which have done that have artificially inflated numbers; there are a lot of duplicated Gameboy sales because of the Gameboy Pocket and Gameboy Color and the length of time the system was available, and the Playstation and PS2 have well known disc drive problems and were avaliable for a long time which increased their resales.

So these disk problems are the reason the PS2 sold 1.7m units in NA this December? Of course systems break and need replaced, and add to the number. However, this rate isn't as high as your trying to make it out to be. If the breakdowns really helped, then the Xbox 360 would be at 20 million units SOLD because of the supposed mass hardware failures at launch Truth is, 3-5% of systems fail. Even if 10% of the PS1/2s failed (2-3x the typical rate) during the first year, that'd only help the PS1's numbers by *maybe* 500,000 units during its first year, and the PS2 by around 2 million (remember, the PS2 only launched in Japan for the first 8 months before it came to the US, and by then, the correct console revision was nearly done)