| Shane said: Any claims here have no hard proof. Wii having peaked isn't about whether it's a fad or not. 6.5 million units in 4.5 months. And it's going to exceed that going forward? With what? 10 million? 20 million? Infinity? Infinity plus 2? The per capita GDP in China is $7600. But anyway, a) even if only 1% of the people can buy a system, that's still 13 million units, and b) it's not like it will stay the same price forever (people seem to be caught up on the price as if it will never go down). Nintendo already has a 100 million selling system. The problem is that system never helped its console efforts. Nintendo needs to work on establishing itself as a console player, and there are some definite hurdles to that with both the game buying public and also developers. In the first few months, we saw the Dreamcast and N64 blast right out of the gates, while we saw PS1 go so slow N64 practically eclipsed the year headstart. At the end of the day, the launch didn't matter, and this launch won't remove the December effect. The only thing early sales may have influenced so far is a willingness to go multiplatform and include more on 360, but minus the earlier launch that would be moot. |
I don't know whether the Wii has peaked or not but I can say that it 1.5 Million units per month is not that extreme of sales for any system; certainly most systems do not get to that level but in every generation there is usually one console who passes this level for quite a while.
Anyways, I (generally speaking) agree with you that India and China are massive untapped markets I would still say that you're overestimating. At 2.5 Billion people there probably is only about1 Billion households, of which only about 1% can spend about $500 on a gaming console (10 Million) and only 25-50% of those people would be actually interested in a gaming system for a grand total of 2.5 Million to 5 Million potential PS3 sales. I would also say that there is about 10 times as many people who could afford a $100 system.
Now, as for your N64 and Dreamcast comments I just want to say that the N64 and Dreamcast took off well in North America. Neither system was particularly popular in Japan or Europe and their poor sales in these regions eventually impacted sales in North America. By the end of 2007 it is likely that the Wii will have sold more units in Japan and Europe than the N64, Dreamcast or Gamecube ever did.
