Viper1 said:
Blykmik, I respect your predictions but I think you're putting way too much stock in the whole HD thing. Most Wii gamers don't really care. It's impact on sales have proven this so why suppose it will later? |
Viper1,
You're right, but the HD thing was not my only basis in thinking that the Wii sales will eventually slow to "normal" growth. I'll get to that in a sec, but 89 million at the 5 year mark is huge... and only 11 million off from your prediction of 100 mill. 
No other Nintendo home console has gotten anywhere near that.
And like I said... the Wii prediction is a tough one. The supply constraints are obviously making it difficult to tell how high the demand is. Any way you look at it, the Wii is a huge sucess. It is just hard to predict for how long it will last because of a number of factors... High Def only being one of them. There is also the fact that a large amount of Wii owners are not necessarily Wii gamers (I'm one of those by the way... and I'm definitely a gamer). But we all know how mainstream the Wii has become... It is just that this type of energy doesn't keep up for ever. I would predict that *eventually* the Wii phenomenon will settle down and it will be back to gamers getting Wii (probably still in very respectible numbers).
But it took the PS2 5 years, 9 months to hit 100 million. And that is a crazy feat... If you look at the chart I linked above, the Wii is trending stronger than the PS2 and the PS3 is tracking pretty much identically (the 360 is tracking short). I'm a big believer that Sony has based everything they've done with the PS3 on a long term model with the specific intent to increase / improve lifetime sales the same way they did from PS1 to PS2. Sony was forced into the market earlier than they were ready (price wise) mainly because 1.) 360 beat them to next-gen by a year and 2.) they *needed*/wanted to assure Blu-ray mass adoption and "victory".
So this thread is asking about what will this gen's war look like at the end of 2011.
Besides the difficulting of guessing at the retail prices at that time (which has as much to do with sales as just about anything), you also have to project where the companies will be in terms of their 8th generation consoles. I think Nintendo is going to ride the Wii and do everything they can to keep it as sucessfull as possible for as long as possible... they've been making money since day one... and they have a hit. So they may be really able to set themselves up better than they imagined for whatever comes next... and they may have bought themselves quite a few more years than originally intended before they need to come out with something new.
For the 360, I'm pretty certain that IF Microsoft is going to stay in the hardware side of the gaming business, we'll already know about the NeXtBox by the end of 2011. Knowing Microsoft, it will likely be a kind of "mandatory" upgrade. They'll make Live better and more functional, they'll have a bigger optical disc (or a huge mandatory HDD... or both) and they'll take their 30-50 million existing customers and tell them you have to upgrade.
Sony has been clear that they're playing it out for 10 years... they've already got the large optical, they've already got the mandatory HDD, any conceivable peripheral can be added... the GUI firmware is extremely updateable, and they haven't even rolled out their friggin online service yet in Home. So even in 2011, we will NOT be hearing about the PS4. They're going to stick with the PS3 and rely on the fact that they don't think anyone will come out with something more "next-gen" than that... Kinda like how it is hard to see (for some people) the difference between SD and HD... How much better can the next Xbox be in 2011? And what will the price of it be? When the price of the PS3 at that time might be $199.
I don't think the Wii will be at 120mill in 2011 because I think the "innovation" of the control will wear off (and you may even see that type of control on the other consoles)... But they'll have all this money to come up with the next truly innovative thing... And they'll probably start of the next generation of consoles by themselves.. .and on their own. But I think with the Wii, Nintendo has distiguished themselves as something different than the PS3/360 home console. And I think they'll go with that because it obviously works for Nintendo.
Disclaimer: I own all three systems... And I have stock in MSFT and SNE. 
