Lifespan of the Wii?

[Shane]

Nintendo's gonna have 3 million units per month for three months? One month maybe (globally). The people calling for this insane production boost must know something Nintendo's not revealing to the rest of us. Some projects can be cancelled, but it would be silly to pull the plug on anything that's already cost 8 figures. Makes much more sense to port it to 360 or better yet go to Sony and beg for money. PS2 had 414 third party games at the end of 2002, but it's not really a fair comparison because it had been out for an extra year. Better would be Microsoft with 176. Nintendo's previous system had a 12% market share. It'll take more than just being better than that. PS1 did not have the PlayStation brand or the 12 years of building developer relations that goes along with it. Also, back then, Sony was not a strong publisher, and its internal efforts had been jokes consisting primarily of its own crappy licenses. Sony's not the new kid on the block any more. They know the industry, and the industry knows them. I do think they're too arrogant for their own good, but that doesn't negate the good things that they have going. Let's see Nintendo try to sell a $600 system and see how far they get. You can only get so far on the basis of one company. We saw that with N64 and Gamecube. At least on N64 they had Rare, but now they don't even have that. Third parties are needed to win. They need to start embracing them and stop doing everything based on their own needs. That's what got them in trouble in the first place. I want to see a company willing to spend. That to me says they're serious. Aggressive marketing, losses on hardware, shopping for exclusives, online gaming, whatever it takes. It can be argued this isn't the smartest move, and perhaps Nintendo's too small to do it, so cutting corners was probably their best strategy. We saw Microsoft reduce about 25% months ago, and they're just above the 10 million mark. Sony's halfway to that point and has a lot more room to reduce. The difference between N64 and now is that N64 lost all its exclusives before it even had a chance to get them. Microsoft may not have wanted shorter lifecycles perse, but their goal of launching earlier than the competition resulted in it. PS3 already has third party support. It doesn't need to get it. Obviously, going forward, we are talking about something different, but there are enough major projects already in the works that developers will be looking at sales of those to determine where to go next. Sony doesn't even have any first party games out yet. They never feel the need to launch with a killer app. If they did, we'd have seen God of War II on PS3, where it probably should have been. Bingo. Once Nintendo's quick start disappeared combined with lackluster third party sales, support dried up. The exclusives are meaningless, though. Well, maybe not quite meaningless, but largely pretty close to it. Mario, Pokemon, SSB, etc. are all excellent exclusives to have, but as far as third parties, the list ranges from "Who cares?" to "Okay, maybe even pretty good," with an emphasis on "Who cares?" Their biggest exclusives are spinoffs that we already know won't sell as well as the main franchises (we saw this with both FF and RE already) that are going to be on other systems. Making a profit over the long term at the expense of short term losses is how the industry works. Nintendo can have a profit annually (primarily from its portable sales but whatever), but the others are willing to be more aggressive.