Plezbo on 25 March 2012
| Chark said: I'm not an analyst, but I like to speculate. I'm sure plenty of you have more knowledge and can fill in some info, but let's see if this makes some sense. Nintendo typically sells handhelds 2 to 1 over Sony, so 66% and 33% market share respectfully. The DS sold 160mil while the PSP sold 80mil, something close to that right? Looking at sales this week or so of the 3DS and the Vita, we can see around the same thing. Handheld sales aren't dropping much anymore, we still have spring and summer to see what happens but we can expect fall and winter sales to be up over current. Now, 3DS sold something like 16mil in its first year out, so Sony's handheld should sell half that its first year judging by market share trend. I know share fluctuates but for this purpose, allow it. So Sony should sell 8mil Vitas by the end of the year. That's an average of over 150,000 a week WW. Right now their average is around 145,000 a week WW. (Ignore that I added the first week in Japan, it's also included launch sales so the fact its under my calculated what should be expected goal don't attack it, civility please.) the Vita sales aren't stellar right now, but they are probably on the bottom end of sales for the next few months. -60,000 a week is going to be hard to make up for later this year, but we know what fall and winter bring to sales numbers and if it's proportionate to what the 3DS saw in growth we can expect a couple months or so of 2 to 4 times the sales of what we see now. So if Vita sells 200k to 400k for a length of time during the holiday season they will be on track market share wise to the previous generation against Nintendo. Of course it could be poised to sell even more since that mark isn't the hardest thing to achieve. It's an opportunity for Sony to grab substantial market share from Nintendo if they don't pull off what they did last year because 3DS sales are low now too. The 3DS is already positioned to sell over 10 million without a significant holiday boost but if they can't double over the Vita, Sony will have more market share in the handheld industry than they might have had ever. And Vita sales could rocket up considering Japan's sales can't really go anywhere but up. This year could be a solid year for handheld competition. |
You definitely make some good points. I think one thing that is certain is that the feeling that the system would fail are gone. I don't see this thing competing directly with the 3DS on a sales basis,but could certainly see it maintain global market share. Europe sales will go up and it seems Japans will go down, but America remains the same proportion wise.
