This is a bit of a progress report for my current research into the Latin American Market:
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December 20th Totals for All Americas markets
Brazil & Mexico Nintendo Channel Total (Mii Channel): 10,061,345 / 24.56 = 409,663 submissions
Canada Nintendo Channel Total (Mii Channel): 9,413,513 / 19.73 = 477,116 submissions
USA Nintendo Channel Total (Mii Channel): 88,535,577 / 20.56 = 4,306,205 submissions
Americas Total Mii Channel Dec 20, 2010 = 5,193,000 submissions
Latin America Mii Channel Sept 2008 (Keith) - 94,000 submissions
Canada Mii Channel Sept 2008 2008 (Keith) - 160,000
USA Mii Channel Sept 2008 (Keith) - 1,300,000
Americas Total Mii Channel Late 2008 = 1,554,000 submissions
USA Wii LTD in Sept 08 = 12.5m USA Wii LTD Dec 20 2010 = 34m?
USA HW = x2.72, Submissions = x3.34
Wii Americas userbase from Jan 1 2009 to now has roughly doubled, slightly more if Keith's figures are from August or September. It looks like the online rate of use for Wii is responsible for 40% of the Mii Channel growth?
Latin American Nintendo Channel Canada Nintendo Channel USA Nintendo Channel
Data Minimum = 10,000 Hrs Data Minimum = 10,000 Hrs Data Minimum = 50,000 Hrs
DKC Returns: ~2,200 submissions DKC Returns ~2,800 submissions DKC Returns ~ 19,230 submissions
Goldeneye 007: ~1,460 submissions Goldeneye ~ 2,600 submissions Goldeneye ~ 15,050 submissions
Lost Winds (WW): ~6,300 submissions Lost Winds ~ 7,880 submissions Lost Winds ~ 56,590 submissions
Wii Music: ~27,000 submissions Wii Music ~ 41,370 submissions Wii Music ~ 313,800 submissions
Galaxy 2: ~39,850 submissions Galaxy 2 ~ 32,480 submissions Galaxy 2 ~ 264,090 submissions
MH3: ~7,300 submissions MH3 ~ 6,600 submissions MH3 ~ 52,402 submissions
Wii Sports: ~402,400 submissions Wii Sports ~ 466,000 submissions Wii Sports ~ 4,206,550 submissions
Just Dance: ~2,400 submissions Just Dance ~ 7,450 submissions JD ~ 138,370 submissions
NSMB Wii ~ 94,700 submissions NSMB Wii ~ 100,150 submissions NSMB Wii ~ 898,130 submissions
Nights Wii ~ 7,300 submissions Nights Wii ~ 12,430 submissions Nights Wii ~ 127,220 submissions
World of Goo ~9,250 submissions World of Goo ~ 13,860 submissions World of Goo ~ 96,730 submissions
Super Mario Bros 1 ~ 18,400 submissions SMB1 ~ 48,050 submissions SMB1 ~ 518,450 submissions
SMB3 ~ 37,000 submissions SMB3 ~ 75,780 submissions SMB3 ~ 656,180 submissions
Sonic the Hedgehog 1 ~ 3,150 submissions Sonic 1 ~ 9,520 submissions Sonic 1 ~ 98,300 submissions
Donkey Kong Country 1 ~ 6,660 submissions DKC 1 ~ 21,480 submissions DKC1 ~ 155,810 submissions
Wikipedia Highspeed Internet Subscribers (households and businesses - rule of thumber is multiply figure by two fold I'd say) by Country:
Population
USA - 83.97m 308m
Mexico - 17.27m 110m
UK (for comparison) - 17.66m 62m
Brazil - 10.07m 194m
Canada - 9.55m 34m
My guess is USA & Canada internet penetration is 50% for actual people rather than households. In Mexico its more like 1/3 apparently, and Brazil is only about 10%. That said, high speed internet is likely a fairly good barometer of wealth, and even though Mexico / Brazil are far poorer than Canada overall, I don't know that the combined Latin American video game market is smaller than Canada any more.
If the ratios of Mii Channel to Wiis sold in the USA are standard across all regions we have this:
USA : 34m / 4.3m (I figure 35.2m by end of NPD Dec, - 1.2m for two missing weeks)
Canada: X / 0.48m
Latin America: X / 0.41m
With standard ratios I get Mii Channel = 1/8 sample of all Wiis sold. That would put Canada at 3.8m, or 11% of the USA, and Latin America at 3.3m, or 10% of the USA. My impression is the 1/8 is too low - people submitting data in Canada and Latin America should represent more of the market. In Canada, BKK2 had figures a while ago on his website suggesting 2.3m systems by year end 2009, and so Wii is likely around 3m there now. In which case, the Nintendo Channel sample for Canada is 1/6 of the market. With lower internet penetration rates in Latin America, call it 15% vs. 50% in the USA and Canada, the online figures are likely something like 1/2 to 1/4 of the market total. In which case we get 800,000 - 1.6m Wiis. Truth be told though, it could be similar to Canada given that with Colombia, Argentina, Costa Ricia, etc thrown in there are far more internet users with Wii in Latin America than Canada...but much of this is offset by pirated systems / the gray market.
If you add up the user submissions I randomly picked, you find that Latin American submissions are 88% the size of Canadian submissions. For non-Virtual Console, and non-girl oriented software, you find Latin America Canada tends to equal 1/4 to 1/5 the USA sample. Alot of software is pirated in Latin America. I'm not sure how that factors in here - my impression is Nintendo can determine which Wiis are hacked when those Wiis go online and submit data - so I think these might be legit figures for Latin America. Moreover, the downloadable software - Donkey Kong Country 1, Sonic 1, etc - is to my knowledge not "stealable" and these games are doing about 5% of the USA totals for Virtual Console it seems like, and 10% for Wii Ware (which is surprising - since WiiWare is more expensive than Virtual Console by an average of about $3 per game, VC is much larger than WW to date in the USA and Japan).
I'm going to go out on a limb and suggest that for the Americas as a whole, the legtimiate software market is now split up at something like this:
USA - 82% (308m people)
Canada - 10% (32 million people)
Latin America - 8% (580m - I'm defining this as Mexico down to Argentina)
Basically, I think its reasonable to conclude that with Latin America at 19 times the population of Canada, and 85% of the wealth of the United States at only double the population, it is at least 80% of Canada's size for software. Iwata had said sometime in 2009 that South America was 5% of Nintendo's business, which is after all, mostly software. With the Americas at 50%, multiplying 0.5 * 0.08 gets you to 4%, so I think we're on sturdy intellectual ground here.
Let me know what you think about this. I will eventually get to the video game retailers by country as well.
People are difficult to govern because they have too much knowledge.
When there are more laws, there are more criminals.
- Lao Tzu
