| eugene said: I just hate how people believe Nintendo is "expanding" the audience when in truth, these people have always loved nintendo and probably have a DS or one version or another of their previous consoles in the last 20 years. |
With the exception of North America, Nintendo is close to surpassing the Gamecube's sales in (pretty much) every market around the world ...
Now, it is unreasonable to expect that the majority of people who were buying the Gamecube for $100 to $150 are buying a Wii at $250, so it has already branched (quite heavily) into a group of gamers who did not own a Gamecube; thus I think it isn't fair to claim that these gamers "have always loved nintendo" being that they skipped an entire generation of Nintendo games which were some of the best games of all time. These 'new' gamers are comming from somewhere, and most likely it is a combination of XBox, PS2 and gamers who didn't own a previous generation system; this means that they are expanding their market and potentially the market as a whole. In many ways the Wii may have a much smaller market for big name Nintendo games because people who didn't buy a Gamecube are probably less interested in Mario than people who did buy a Gamecube.
Realistically speaking, there are (at least) twice as many people who are interested in the Wii than have currently purchased it but are waiting for it to be $200, $150 or $100; at the end of this generation the Wii will (probably) have outsold every previous Nintendo home console and this is why I think it is unreasonable to expect that it is being sold only to Nintendo fans.
