When does Sony reach the point of no return in Japan?

[albionus]

I know there's little point to responding to the claim that the Wii is a fad. It's simply what Sony fanboys rationalize the stunning change of fortunes in the video game industy as they cry themselves to sleep every night. Nevertheless, I'll expand on something mentioned somewhere on this thread, while games can be a fad the system is not (unless it only supports one type of game or something like that). Generally speaking a system needs a "fad" game at or near launch. Why else are non fanboys going to shell out twice what they will pay 2 years later for a system with only a few games? You need a game that people want to play like crazy for 2-12 months until more games come out because otherwise they won't be playing or buying your system. That being said, is Wii Sports a fad? Most certainly. I managed to get a Wii a couple months ago to play Wii Sports. I still play it though not as much and a month from now I'll be playing only occasionally. That's fine because I'll be playing Super Paper Mario then anyways. After that there's Heatseeker, maybe Godfather, MySims (all 3rd party BTW) as I await Mario Galaxy, Metroid Prime 3, and Animal Crossing. Similarly, I bought an Xbox to play Halo. I played it for about 6 months until I got KotOR and I haven't played it since. Of course Halo 2 is a big reason why but that's the point. By the time I want to play a Wii Sports type game again I'll have Mario vs Sonic, various in depth tennis, golf (already have that one), bowling, and boxing games from which to choose. Also, a quick point that can be found on other threads, but PSP/PS3 games cost more to develop than DS/Wii ones. Twice as much seems to be the consensus, though the do sell for 20% more. Ignoring what effect higher game prices will have on longer-term sales that means that Sony 3rd party games have to sell 67% more than Nintendo ones. In general then if a PS3 game needs 500,000 sales to break even (or nearly 60% of PS3 owners in Japan at this point), a Wii one would only need 300,000 (15% of Wii owners). Devs care about profit more than user base or units sold which helps explain why they would go to the Wii and DS even if they would sell less than on the PS3 and PSP.