NPD: Wii Third-Party Games Really Do Sell

[TheSource]

I said it in the other thread but...

For the USA you can think of the current sales like Pizzas.

Wii is the biggest pizza. It has eight slices. Nintendo takes four, third parties get four.

360 is a smaller pizza but it also has eight slices. Microsoft takes one or two, third parties take six or seven.

PS3 is an even smaller pizza but it also has eight slices. Sony takes two, third parties take six.

 

Publishers prefer the greasy flavor of the smaller pizzas, so they eat more of those pies to get 'full' (of revenue). Together though, the 360 & PS3 pie are still greater than the Wii pie in the USA by 5m or so. 

The issue is, since 360 was a bigger pie until recently, and 3rd parties got to eat more of it, it still made sense to support 360, even though Wii was growing faster.

Math makes it simple: 360 been on the market 32/20 the amount of time Wii has been on the market. Wii sells something like 540k/month in the USA on avg while 360 sells something like 325k/month on avg in the USA.

Once 360 was on the market for only 1.6x the amount of time that Wii was, Wii was going to catch it. But for third parties, the 7 out of 8 3rd party game advantage to 4 out of 8 3rd party game advantage out of total sw sold means that until Wii pushes ahead of 360 by say 70% in hw, or until Nintendo's offerings slow a bit (and they are now) it remains better to support 360  in terms of unit sales. The issue with that is that Wii games are cheaper to develop, so selling less doesn't really mean less profit.

My take is when Wii is at ~ 18.5m in the USA by NPD at the end of the year while 360 is at ~14.5m in the USA by the end of the year that software totals from 3rd party games will be about equal, though they'll continue to make up a higher percentage of the Xbox 360 total software sold. Microsoft actually has a pretty strong 1st party showing later in the year while Nintendo is holding back so the percentages are going to change a bit. I have it as:

Something like ~ 18.5m USA Wiis * 8 games/hw * .58 for Wii 3rd party games by the end of the year - ~86m units

Something like ~ 14.5m USA 360s * 8.75 games/hw * .68 for 360 3rd party games by the end of the year - ~86m units

 

In terms of big remaining 3rd party games, 360 has Madden, GH, COD, Rockband 2, Tales, Infinite Undiscovery, Star Wars, Lego Batman, Prince of Persia, Sonic Unleashed,  Face Breaker, Silent Hill.

Wii has Madden, GH, COD, Tiger Woods, DDR, Star Wars, De Blob, Lego Batman, Cooking Mama, Shaun White, Game Party 2, MySims Kingdom, Tales of Symphonia, Face Breaker, Sonic Unleashed, Rockband 2.

You can get a pretty good idea of how third parties view the two system from those lists, but each list is going to have its share of 500k, 1m, 1m+ hits.