Wii FAILED in sales during Thanksgiving weekend

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Put it this way: Nintendo saw their sales dropping, falling away rather precipitously YoY, throughout this year. Reporting that you are over 20% down on hardware sales is not news shareholders want to hear. Sure still being profitable at those sales is a lot better news to shareholders than reporting improving sales while still losing money, so we won't go there. Potentially selling closer to 2007 than 2008, if things keep falling away they way they were. Not only that but PS3 is now kicking our tail on our home turf (PS3's home turf too, but that's beside the point)

So here's the master plan: drop the price, and we still have our 2009 ace in the hole: NSMB Wii. Plus some other great support titles to come out in December. These things combined should see us achieve sales from BF week through to end of December close to, if not equal to, the same sales period in '08. It won't bring us level with total 2008 sales (actually they will be talking FY sales not calendar year, but we'll keep it simple), but it will re-establish the great momentum we had going in to 2009.

In that context being 250K (31%) down means phase 1 of the cunning plan (kicking off the holiday spending frenzy with a great BF week combining the cut price Wii and the recently on market NSMB Wii) didn't come off as Nintendo would have expected.

To describe it as a failure is overstating things. But it would have caused a few furrowed brows in the board room and the realisation that potentially this holiday season won't be nearly as grand as 2008.

I feel another sporting analogy coming on (Rugby being the best sport I'll use that). When you are up 50-10 in the first half, you don't take your foot off the throat and coast for the rest of the game. You go in for the kill and try to reach 100 points without allowing the opposition to score again in the whole game. If you end the game winning 60-45 after being up 50-10 then the opposition comes off the field in a fairly buoyant mood, with the feeling that in the next game they could take you down. But if you go from 50-10 up in the first half, and end the game at 90-15 then the opposition is totally demoralised and they go into the next game expecting more of the same sort of treatment.

Nintendo is right to be concerned at how this holiday season has started. They are entering the second half of the game with a performance that is giving both MS and PS3 a bit of a sniff of catching up (though no chance of over-taking) if they storm into 2010. Right now Sony will be thinking that they might have a chance of PS3 winning the biggest sales week of the year. If PS3 does win in FFXIII week it will be a massive confidence boost for Sony. "Sony's PS3 has the biggest sales week out of all console manufacturers for the whole of 2009", "Sony's winning strategy with PS3" Fortune Magazine cover: "How Sony fought back after being down for the count". Nintendo really don't want that to happen. Winning the last weekend before Christmas is PR gold for a company trying to win back support for its brand. It means the kind of feel good free advertising that competitors really don't want to see. Personally, I think Sony needed a big game release worldwide in FFXIII week for it to have a chance of beating Wii that week, FFXIII in Japan only isn't going to be enough. But the week is going to be a lot closer than Nintendo is going to be comfortable with.

And don't be so quick to say that Wii is still outselling PS2. Do you know what PS2 achieved in the Americas on it's 3rd BF week? 643K. And world wide on that BF week? 1.2 million. And do you know how many million selling weeks PS2 had in it's 3rd holiday sales season? 5. With the peak sales week achieving 1.79 million. That looks a heck of a lot like Wii's 2008 (2nd) holiday season, in fact the similarities are uncanny. Wii has such a huge lead over PS2 that lifetime sales aren't under threat, but it will be interesting to see if, after going through the first 2 and a bit years ahead on an average weekly basis Wii starts the next couple of years behind PS2 on an average weekly basis.

From a business perspective it's not champagne time. From a gamer's perspective it is still fun time.