Immortal said:
Surely you won't consider the ~2.7m addition by 3DS a non-factor here? None of '07-'10 had new hardware launches. '11 had a fairly large one and is actually declining at a faster rate than ever (well, more or less). Granted that most of that is attributable to the beyond-horrible-makes-me-cry performance of the Wii, but still. |
There's a new machine, but the old machines have also become older. The decline of the old ones offsets the introduction of a new one early on in the generation.
Generally, you're looking at somewhere around a 60-80-100-80-60 for years 1-5 in terms of sales for home consoles. We've seen that the handheld market is a bit slower to adapt new handhelds, and that it seems to be more ala 40-60-80-100-80-60-40. Point is, the drop the DS is seeing is (nearly) similar to the increase that the 3DS is seeing, as is expected from a handeheld machine. The combined sales of PsP NGP won't be much higher than what the PsP was seeing a year earlier.
| Troll_Whisperer said: Also, I'm pretty sure most of the drop every year is attributable to the Wii alone. The gaming industry has had abnormally high numbers this generation because of the Wii. |
Of course, the Wii is one of the two the main reason that this generation was so large (the other being the DS PsP being far larger than handhelds before), and the drop can be partially attributed to it.
The Wii dropped 200k from 2009 to 2010. It played a very minor part in the overall drop, which can be mostly attributed to the DS. You can't really attribute most of the previous drops to the Wii, although this one can.
If you just say "The Wii is down 2.2 million of the 2.7 million, it's the source of the decrease" you're kind of looking short-sighted at it.
The Ps2 is down 600k year on year, the Ps3 is down 350k, the PsP is down 500k.
DS 3DS is up 400k, X360 is up 400k.
I'd say that a more fair way of saying it is that the Wii is responsible for 60% of the Year on Year drop, and that the three Sony Machines are responsible for the other 40%.
I just realised that we now have a monthly chart for sales. That gives me the opportunity to show that software sales aren't declining as much as people seem to think eiher. Take April, for instance. (The below numbers are April for each of the respective years).
| 2007 | 2008 | 2009 | 2010 | 2011 |
| 17.5 million | 41 million | 28.3 million | 33 million | 29.6 million |
April 2011 sold about as much software as both the previous years. 2008 is an anomaly as both GTA IV and Mario Kart Wii launched
March 2011 wasn't any smaller than the previous generations either (larger than all previous years save 2010, by a few million), but I'm not going to bother posting the numbers for that.
My point is, the numbers we're seeing aren't a crisis and everything is horrible. The industry is selling pretty much the same as it has been ever since the Wii launched. Not even Nintendo are in big problems; software sales on the machines are down around 11% (from 85 million to 75 million), and hardware sales are down (from 11.5 to 9.7 million) around 15%.
I don't view this as an industry crisis at all, really. It's just one generation reaching it end, and another one starting.
