Immortal said:
Perspective. 50m in itself means nothing, being decades ago. SNES was actually a pretty decent success; it maintained more than 80% of its predecessor's sales, with much, much stiffer competiton; in fact, the fifth generation was probably the most competetive ever, with the Sega Genesis managing a very comparable 40m. Also, if we bring handheld sales into this (I don't see why not; it's the same industry), Nintendo's non-"innovative" GBA managed over 80m against less than 120m for GB. The thing here is that Gameboy sales include GBC, which was a fairly big deal graphically, meaning a significant amount of people probably upgraded, making the userbase not more than 80-90m at best. Also, GBA was killed very prematurely (its successor launched three and a half years after it) when it was barely hitting its stride, so it probably would've done a lot more. Looking at this kind of precedent, I'd say it's very likely that WiiU will do about as well as Wii, since competition is likely to be much weaker, given Sony's financial state and the Vita, and there's no reason for WiiU to be killed prematurely by a successor. |
Thats why I mentioned consoles specifically. Nintendo has a stranglehold on handheld gaming. Yes the psp sold tremendously well, but i firmly believe the sales were due to it being a popular multimedia device, not a popular gaming device. Hence why the vita is doing so poorly now that everyone has moved on to smartphones, and hence the abysmal tie-ratio, despite it being a "core console gaming experience." Yes people will argue its due to pirating. But the 360 suffers heavy pirating and yet it has the highest attach ratio this gen. Heck even the "kiddy friendly ds" which is also amazingly easy to pirate on has a higher attach ratio.
The Wii U faces much stiffer competition if this gen is any indication of the future. The 360 and PS3 are going to end up having sales quite close to the wii when all is said and done. The 360 has made big headway in attracting some of the wii's casual audience. All three future consoles are going to feature some sort of motion control and tablet esque connectivity from the get go. The one big advantage the Wii U has is that its launching a year early. But if it ends up being much weaker than the nextbox and ps4, and third parties aren't able to just port the same games to it, I think its going to sell considerably less than the wii considering how fierce competition is for the casual audience currently.
