Lifespan of the Wii?

[HappySqurriel]

Shane said:
Nintendo may have established the industry, but that hasn't mattered in over a decade. They lost their grip and have proven to not know a way to get it back. The bleeding looks to have finally stopped, but the damage is done. The PS1 did have its advantages over the PS3, but it also had its disadvantages. I disagree. Nintendo had plenty of third party love on the Cube. At the end of 2002, Gamecube had 156 third party games. If Wii surpasses that, it won't be by much. Cube had plenty of support. What it lacked was support that would move systems, and their own internal games have definitely lost a step. As I said, they still don't have an exclusive (or even a multiplatform game for that matter) the likes of Resident Evil that they did have at this point on that system, though. A look at the monthly history shows that Sony almost always moves 2-3+ million units in the US in the month of December. For the PS2, this amounted to 11 million units, just shy of the total amount of Gamecubes sold during its lifespan. This is why when people are jumping up and down about how Nintendo moved 300k during February, I'm more interested in seeing what the holidays look like. Nintendo definitely knows how to make a profit, which is a viable strategy but not cutthroat enough for my tastes. I viewed Wii as a bit of white flag waving, but we'll see how long they can go before costs become too much for them to even do something like this. Sony's been a target, but it's always been a target. Based on PS2 software and hardware sales, people are obviously still buying Sony products, so I don't see how they alienated customers. No doubt PS3 would be doing better if it had a lower price, but that's nothing that... lowering the price can't fix. The thing about PS3 is that all developers just assumed that it would be #1, and most of them continue to assume so. With that, they've gotten so far into development of their AAA titles that they can't just scrap them, so they will be coming out on PS3. If the world ends and FFXIII fails to sell on a Sony system, then there's a door opening as far as future versions, but we're talking a couple years off. At most, in terms of current major products, all they can do is put them multiplatform (meaning Xbox 360). Best case scenario for Nintendo on the major franchises is spinoffs and last gen porting. Microsoft wants shorter lifecycles anyway. They're using this as a way to get an upperhand, and it certainly worked this time in terms of stealing exclusives from Sony and also just having a higher userbase by the time the others launched. Sony will go on its own terms. They invested too much into PS3 to just drop it in 3 years.

For your comment on amazing sales for the Playstation Brand I just want to point out the ratio of systems sold in Q4 as compared to the full year for 2002 to 2005:

PS2 2002	54.40%
PS2 2003	48.80%
PS2 2004	43.40%
PS2 2005	41.24%
GC 2002	53.93%
GC 2003	65.85%
GC 2004	53.93%
GC 2005	57.62%
Xbox 2002	52.71%
Xbox 2003	54.40%
Xbox 2004	50.47%
Xbox 2005	32.55%

So as a rough guestimate 40% to 60% of your systems sales will happen in the last quarter of the year. Using this and current sales data the Wii will sell between 5.75 to 8.65 Million systems, the XBox 360 will sell between 3.95 and 5.90 Million systems, and the PS3 will sell between 2.75 and 4.06 Million systems in 2007. There is nothing magical about the Playstation brand ... It sold more units in the holiday period because it was more popular and sold more units throughout the rest of the year.