Wall Street Journal: Nintendo starts to cool down

[Ail]

venepe said:

Ail said:

venepe said:
This articles are interesting but are too narrowminded I think. For some reason they compare the Wii with the PSP to make a point, and don't mention the DS success. Second, they don't allow for the upcoming games for the Wii, I am sure that NoJ is counting on Monster Hunter and Motion+ to increase sales. It just seems that they assume that the March sales results are going to be the norm rather than the exception.

 

Actually there is data to back up their statement but the journalist failed to mention it.

2008 sales were lower than 2007 in Japan despite the first half of 2008 having monster Nintendo software releases there.

2009 is just a continuation of 2008 with no good software released which does make things worse.

Correct.  However I think the decrease in sales for the 2008 year was due to NoJ expectations in the success of Wii Music and AC during the holiday season.  Thus, I don't believe that it is a dowward trend, but rather a low period due to a miscaculation, which will reverse if NoJ meets their expectations this year.

 

I think 2009 will be lower than 2008 but not on the scale that it is now ( right now sales are down  63% compared to 2008, 412k units vs 1.114 million units), it's just going to be very hard to make up for the drop in Q1 during the rest of the year...

One of the issue the Wii is suffering from in Japan is that if you want to develop a niche budget title (for which there seem to be a huge market in Japan) and want to target the biggest audience you do it on the PS2, not on the Wii ( as can attest the weekly Japan software sales, every month or so there is a PS2 title that does 80k+ on first week..)