| Pineapple said: You'd think that the later in the generation a game is released, the more it will sell. It's not like that on the Wii or DS, or generally on long-legged consoles (as in, consoles that have games with long legs, not consoles that sell for a long time). The reason for this is pretty much that the user habits of people are Year 1 - Buy 4 games This is an oversimplification, and I might even be quoting it slightly incorrectly. The Source is my source on this one. Now, let's look at the Wii. (2007 is year 1). And yes, I'm aware that the software numbers for the years are a bit off, that's because I'm slightly misusing the data. The "Year 1" is from each person who buys it. I'm counting a person buying a Wii in November 2007 as having owned it a year by the start of 2008. That doesn't really mean anything for the main point of this, though. Year 1 - 16 million buy 4 games = 64 million You might wonder what the point of this is. The point is that the Wii software numbers are going to even out at roughly the levels they are now. We're not going to see the Wii sell more software next year. The Wii has long legged games. This means that whichever games release in Year 5 are going to have to fight the games from year 3 and 4 for the sales. In 2008, games had to fight against all of the newly released big-hitters of the year. In 2009, the new games had to fight all of the newly released big-hitters of the year, but also Wii Fit and Mario Kart Wii. In 2010, they had to fight all of the newly released big-hitters of the year, but also Wii Fit Plus, Just Dance, Wii Sports Resort and Mario Kart Wii. In 2011, they'll have to fight all of the newly released big-hitters of the year, but also Wii Fit Plus, Mario Kart Wii, New Super Mario Bros. Wii, Just Dance 2, Donkey Kong Returns and Wii Sports Resort.
If you have 5 people fighting over 100 cakes, they'll each get 15-25 cakes. If you have 10 people fighting over 100 cakes, they'll each get 5-15 cakes. If you have 15 people fighting over 100 cakes, they'll each get 4-9 cakes. If you have 20 people fighting over 100 cakes, they'll each get 3-7 cakes. That's how the Wii is developing. Each year we'll see fewer and fewer mega hitters. (PS: Some people have been upset that I sound so confident when I say stuff, like everything is the truth. It's just my expectations for the future, so apologies if I sound too much like I'm correct) |
That was a slightly longer response than I expected, :P. I guess that makes sense, though I actually expect a lot of older titles (SMG, for example) to hit 10m -- generally, Wii users will only pay the substantial $50 for titles they know are gonna be good because of word of mouth, convincing advertisements and such. Eventually, around 2012 to keep Wii strong with the Bii onslaught, I expect, Nintendo's gonna cut the price of all their software. In that year, I believe, all the Wii users who should be buying only a quarter of a game for the year will be buying about 1 game. That's when I think that a lot of surprise 10m sellers will pop up since the older owners will try to get the titles they knew a little bit about, but weren't adventurous enough to fork out $50 for.
Also, the cake analogy connects with my initial hypothesis pretty well, actually. Rather than selling 20m as the 2007/8 titles did, they'll sell barely over 10m. I expect the newer titles to compete well enough with the older titles to sell a little over 10m, but they'll have much shorter legs because the giants will eat up the part of the base that's buying older titles. So if each year is a lake, there'll be just a couple of enormous old whales (NSMB, MK) having some of the food with a lot of small, new fish (titles released in the same year) eating food as well, but very few middle aged fish (titles released last year) from now on.
P.S. Why the heck do people get upset by your confidence, :P? When you're making a point, you're doing something wrong if you don't sound like you're sure, xD.
“These are my principles; if you don’t like them, I have others.” – Groucho Marx
