Lifespan of the Wii?

[Erik Aston]

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.

Wii has now sold 45% of GCs LTD in non-NA regions. Clearly, Nintendo is back.

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.

Nintendo had a lot of multiplatform games early. When XBox outperformed GC in NA, and multiplat games (sports, racing, WWII games, etc) did better on it, those games disappeared. Also, Resident Evil was announced for PS2 before debuting on GC, killing its exclusivity advantage.

If Nintendo has less 3rd party games, they will have far more exclusives, by the end of 2007.

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.

Do you understand how this industry works? Xmas sales are easily predictable based on yearly sales. Wii will outsell PS3 in all regions this Xmas.

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.

First of all, making a profit is not a strategy, it is a goal. The only throat that Sony and MS are cutting is their own. Second, the one company making money is certainly not the one that has to worry the most about ongoing high costs.

Nintendo waved the white flag in 2002, when Iwata left. Wii is a new battle. However, Nintendo was in a position after GC that they could have played for 2 more generations with financial disaster consoles like XBox. They are such a financially sound company, that they were never in danger of leaving the console war, and with the kind of profits they're making now, its clear they'll have no problem launching 6th and 7th home consoles.

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.

Obviously they've alienated customers from the PS3, not PS2. They're not even going to sell 10 million units before the end of this year.

And Sony is in no place to be cutting the price. If PS3 is as difficult to cost reduce as PS2 was, it will finally reach the Wii's launch price near the end of its life. ($300:$130::$600:$260).

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.

So you're saying that PS3 has to hope that "current major products" will be enough to give them an advantage, because Nintendo is already outselling them based on "spinoffs and last gen porting," making it inevitable that "the major franchises" will come "a couple years off."

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.

No company wants short lifecycles. If they're still losing money on PS3 in 3 years, and they've obviously lost the war, they'll have to launch a new system early. They simply won't have another choice.