The Official April 2010 NPD Thread (Data for 4 wks ending May 2 in 3 hours)

[Ail]

psrock said:

RolStoppable said:

Innervate said:

Demotruk said:
April 2009 was such an easy comparison for Wii.

Wii is in trouble, it's in the process of collapsing, I hope Nintendo can do enough to bring it back.

It's not in trouble of collapsing, there hasn't been anything worthwhile on the system since NSMB:Wii.

Which exactly is why the Wii is in trouble. It looks like the efforts of third parties to slow down and eventually stop Nintendo are finally starting to pay off. Mainly due to Nintendo's own mistakes though, by failing to have a good holiday lineup in 2008 which has been hurting the Wii a lot ever since.

The Wii momentum collapsed during 2009 and Wii Sports Resort, a price cut and NSMB Wii merely stopped the Wii from falling even further. The momentum had stabilized for a while, but now it looks like it's going down again in the near future.

Let me try to be serious for a second.

Nintendo does believe one or two games can support the Wii for months, it has worked for Maria Kart, WiiSports, NSMB Wii. The first 5 months of this year has been just terrible but somehow NSMB, Wiifit and Wii Sports Resort has kept the Wii going. This shows how powerful these games are, but how lackluster the third party support has been.

Nintendo is winning alone and besides a few games Casual games from third party, nobody wants to join the party.

 

One interesting number I saw in the NPD report was that casual games represented 24% of the games purchased this month down from 36% one year ago. That might explains the Wii decline.

Of course we would still have to know what they categorize as casual games to know that...