Atari 2600 as a lesson to game designers ... and a foreshadowing of the Wii

[Ail]

RolStoppable said:

Ail said:

RolStoppable said:

IIRC at E3 2007 Nintendo themselves said that only about 10 % of Wii owners didn't own a console before. This percentage most likely has increased since then, but still isn't all that significant. These console ownerships likely include lapsed gamers who skipped a generation or two though.

Regarding Wii Fit, a lot of core gamers (i.e. people who played games last generation) have purchased it and another factor is that the usage of a Wii isn't restricted to a single person in a household, thus making it possible that the owner of the Wii is a core gamer, but the owner of Wii Fit isn't. Or a husband who is a longtime gamer had to purchase Wii Fit for his wife for example. The point is that by far not every Wii Fit was sold to someone who never owned a console before, therefore the sales of Wii Fit can't be used to measure the amount of new gamers because there's too much overlap.

Most of the time Nintendo talks about market expansion, they are talking just about their growing revenue figures and rarely provide actual figures for how many people are new to gaming. Probably to leave Sony in the wrong security that the pool of PS2 owners who hasn't bought a current gen console yet, remains for the most part untouched. The Wii definitely is getting new people on board, but it's not as significant as it is sometimes made out to be.

So what you're saying is that Blue Ocean is just a marketing thingy and in practice it's same ole same ole lol ?

AT E3 2007 Wii Fit wasn't released yet and the number of Wii sold was quite small so what credit can we give to numbers you quote dating from back there were less than 10 million of Wii on the market ?( numbers which don't refer ownership of a console in the previous gen but ownership of a console at any point). And of course the people that bought a Wii the first 6 months were more hardcore, heck those guys had to go through waiting list and stuff..

Besides if you compare this gen to last a lot more consoles have been sold at the same point in the gen. This would mean if the market didn't grow that people that bought a console last gen bought one a lot more earlier this gen while consoles are more expensives and a very significant number of people at that, I doubt it...

So far roughly 86 million consoles have been sold, at about the same point last gen there were about 55-60 million consoles sold....

Sorry but that does not add up at all..

That or if Wii hasn't expanded the market significantly, the PS3 and the 360 have and I don't think anyone would believe that ( and to account for the difference pretty much every PS360 owners would have to be new to consoles lol).

No, that's not what I am saying. Blue Ocean is real and bringing new and lapsed gamers into the market, but my point is that of the growth Nintendo had with Wii over the Gamecube, most of it so far comes at the expense of Sony, because the Wii is gobbling up the former PS2 userbase which is also upgrading faster in general than people did in previous generations.

 

And how you reconcile your argumentation with the latest Nielsen survey about console useage which shows that clearly Wii users have a different behavior with their console than PS2 users did ?

If they were mostly the same you would expect a similar behavior...