January NPD 2019

[Wyrdness]

The_Liquid_Laser said:

 

Well this is an interesting line of thinking.  Let's follow this argument to it's logical conclusion.  (I actually think you are on to something, but maybe miss a detail or two.)

There were 33m who got Wii Sports Resort (and motion+), and 24m who got Kinect.  A total of 57m.  (Let's ignore the Move for simplicity).  If your line of thinking is correct, then most of these people would already have a Wii.  They already enjoyed motion controls, and they wanted an upgrade, either Kinect or Wii motion+.  And even the ones who never had a Wii also were enthusiastic for motion controls, they just wanted the tech to improve beyond the basic Wii remote.  So either way you have 57m people who are very enthusiastic about motion controls.  (Again assuming your argument is correct.)  Furthermore these people do not treat motion controls as a fad.  They didn't just play the Wii for a year or so and move on.  They played the Wii and then several years later wanted even more.  These are motion control gamers who have no intention of leaving gaming.

The main problem with this argument is that these 57m gamers did not show up to buy the XB1.  In fact, the 24m people who initially bought Kinect did not show up to buy the XB1 either.  There is no indication that these gamers actually were enthusiastic about the Kinect at all.  If they actually liked Kinect Adventures, XB1 would have had strong sales right out of the gate.  Obviously it did not. 

Instead 24m people were convinced to try out Kinect, and their response to it was "meh".  It was not a craze.  It is difficult to find people who actually liked the Kinect.  It is instead much easier to find people who will swear that "other people" like Kinect.  If it were such a craze then why won't these people come forward themselves
?

Your argument doesn't really do anything to disprove what any of us has said as it's very much a speculative piece trying to play down concrete numbers, Wii was the first time any home console catered specifically to the blue ocean so it was a new market even though casuals had always been around since the NES they never really were focused on until the DS and Wii came along and built a market specifically around them and new gamers with lite gaming needs. What gaming companies didn't realize was two things one was the rise of mobile and two was that the blue ocean being mainly new gamers and casuals don't exhibit the same spending habits and patterns as dedicated avid gamers so when they bought the Wii they would be happy with it alone with many likely only having a few titles like Wiisports throughout to the point they won't rush out and get anything else as their needs for gaming were lite. The result was many of them didn't move on from the Wii to the Wii U as the is no incentive for them in their gaming needs to do so instead the market was hijacked by the mobile gaming boom which launched using a similar approach to what Nintendo brought.

MS entered into the blue ocean with the Kinect and did well and ran into the same problem the Kinect owners didn't move on to the X1 because they saw no need to as these aren't avid gamers they were new gamers with lite gaming needs that already had devices giving them what both Wii U and X1 were trying to entice them with this is why the Wii still gets versions of Just Dance that still break 1m. The X1 argument itself is very flimsy because the platform was also heavily expensive and was not marketed as a blue ocean device either with MS trying to push a multimedia agenda at the time Kinect was bundled more as a UI feature than for games.