NPD: Wii software sales are more concentrated on a few titles than 360/PS3

[mrstickball]

noname2200 said:

Ail said:
This is why I have been saying all along that the Wii will have trouble matching the number of million sellers of the Xbox360.
The top titles draw a lot of the sales...

I would agree, except for the second part I alluded to: "What makes this last fact especially puzzling is that we know from the NPD that (at least in the U.S.) the Wii is selling more software, first and third-party, than any other system..."

Which again is part of what confuses me so much; the two pieces of data seem to be contradictory, unless we assume that the Wii is a complete beast when it comes to selling software. Considering the fact that it's "tie-ratio" is fairly high (still above the PS3's) despite moving such massive amounts of hardware, it seems safe to assume that. And yet, how big can that pie actually be?

psrock said:
Reading from this, it sounds like the wii is quite front loaded while they have 400 games fighting for a little bit of the pie. That's not good.

The 360 to me is the most balanced of the 3 systems, and they sell from all aspect.

It looks like the data backs up your first paragraph, and yet we keep seeing (on this site and from publisher's releases) that several Wii games sneak in sales under the radar. So do we then assume that of the remaining 56% of software, a few dozen titles are raking in disproportionate shares of sales as well? Honest question: I don't have the answer yet.

Not completely sure what your second paragraph means, so I'll await further clarification before comment.

mrstickball said:
Not good if the result of this is cannibalization of sales for the lesser-selling titles. That's what it would seem to point to, which is very unhealthy for the leading console.

True, although I would like to point out that the situation is only modestly worse on the Wii than the other systems (13% for the Wii, as opposed to "closer to 20%" for the others). And again, it appears that the Wii pie is larger than the other systems.

Nonetheless, your point is well taken.

 

But look at the numbers again. That 13/80 versus the standard 20/80 means that there's a 65% higher likelihood of your Wii title seeing poorer sales due to canibalization. That 7% difference is huge in the grand scheme of things, because skews data strongly in favor of the Nintendo evergreens and major casual, non-Nintendo successes.