Does the Wii compare to the PS2?

[Erik Aston]

Some thoughts:

First of all, sales do not "prove" what is "quality" or "good," because those are subjective terms that cannot be proven. "Quality" is just sort of used after the fact. In fact, if you listen to people in real life, they never do the critical psuedo-analysis of "quality," but just talk about likes and dislikes. This game "kicks ass." Why? Because it lets me do X.

As I've mentioned, it seems to me that most people choose SNES or PS2 as the "best" console because they were the peaks for certain types of games. Others could easily pick 2600 or Wii, because they are the peaks for other types of games. Less people (in my experience) seem to pick NES or PS1, even though objectively, they were the more historically important systems.

As for the average age of gamers, I believe that most of the surveys which came back with an age around 30 included Mom playing Flash games, for the purpose of making it look like games were "growing up," while the average age of a console gamer lingered around 18 or 20. But I don't have any real research to support that.

Anyways... It is interesting to compare the Wii's game library to the PS2's in terms of sales, and see how well it could do over its life.

Obviously, Wii is poised to easily win at the top of the library. Wii Sports and Wii Play, and likely Wii Fit and Mario Kart Wii, will outsell everything on PS2 by many millions. I believe including the undertracking of MGS2 and a missing Medal of Honor game, PS2 had 10 games to cross the 6m mark in sales. Wii should match and beat that, with a 7th game (Mario and Sonic) on the verge of the 6m mark already. But as you get down to lower level sales, PS2 seems to have unassailable totals, like 23 4m sellers (and some missing), over 100 2m sellers, and nearly 200 1m sellers (and I would guess the real number is pushing 250). In terms of total game shipments, I'm pretty sure PS2 passed 1.5b (thats b with a billion) fairly recently. Wii had 36 million-shipping games and 230m software shipped through September.

I think that in some regards, PS2 software sales will remain better than Wii's. The industry, especially EA who had at least 60 million-sellers for PS2, had mastered creating games for a certain audience segment. But with that segment now becoming overshot and overserved, and tired of the same old thing, the industry is having a hard time learning how to reach the new demos on Wii; often because they only view them as new demos, I think.

Today the industry is by and large having a hard time making consistent profits, led by EA who is siphoning money like an auto-maker. So I'm honestly not sure if the industry is going to keep enough people employed to make the quantity of million-sellers or 2m-sellers PS2 had. But in most regards, Wii will win sales comparisons with PS2.