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noname2200 said: Are you positing that every 360 and PS3 sale was to the traditional market? Especially in light of the Kinect and Move? Far more importantly, you're assuming that The Market is exclusively made up folks who have already bought in, i.e. if you haven't purchased a gaming system you're never going to buy a gaming system. That's a fallacy that I'm attempting to address. It's a rare person who doesn't spend money on entertainment. The question the videogame industry should be asking, the question that Nintendo briefly asked, is "so why is it that the bulk of our customers fall in the same small section of the general public? And how do we break out of this insular rut?" I submit that the Wii and DS are excellent evidence that a market for videogames exists beyond the narrow band that has bought in during previous generations. I further submit that that market puts less emphasis on (expensive, resource-consuming) graphical output than it does on a wide variety of other factors. And I finally submit that a console that properly and continuously harnesses the values that the general public prefers in its entertainment will do at least as well as the DS, with the potential to do even greater. By contrast, even after attempting to devour the "new" market created by the Wii, the graphically-intensive, super-cutting-edge HD consoles are each petering out short of what even the outdated, gimmicky, SD Wii managed to do in a shorter timespan. That's what I'm getting at. There are obviously millions of people who drool over bleeding-edge tech. The internet is full of them. And there are extremely few, if any, people who would turn away from better graphics (assuming they don't have to pay for them!). But at the end of the day, the group that demands a console that costs its manufacturer around $1,000 per unit at launch is relatively small and, more importantly, unable to singularly maintain a healthy console. A first-party would be much better served focusing its resources on other fronts. |
We have the number of Kinects sold, and the number of Move homes. I believe it's 15 million for Kinect, and 2 million for move. In total, the xbox 360 sales are 68.8m - 15m -> 53.8m homes without kinect and the PS3 sales are 67m - 2m -> 65m homes without move. The combined sales amount to 118.8m. That is still roughly 5/4 of total Wii Sales (96.7m), that is without considering that probably some 10m Wii's were used for core typical red-market gaming content.
That was my initial gripe with your argument, and my argument is that Nintendo needs to consider that market.
Your initial post was this -> "The lesson I allude to isn't that superior graphics are an automatic failure. It's in the importance of superior graphics, or the large lack thereof."
Like I said, the N64 was lacking something basic, before one should consider graphics, and that was its media. With the Wii, it's much more clear that the culprit to losing the red ocean market was weaker graphical capabilities and in general weaker hardware specs. Mind you, a good counter-argument to this is the gamecube, which had everything right. However, the Nintendo brand power was already very damaged at that point in the home console marketspace, it was a hard sell for Nintendo. When the Wii came out, the focus on the blue-ocean strategy was a springboard for Nintendo to recapture the red ocean. Sadly it didn't happen, but the U is promising just that.
As for the rest of your argument, you simply cannot bundle the logic of the DS with the logic of the Wii, since the portable market functions very differently to the home console market. Also, your understimation of the HD market this gen is staggering, as I pointed out in my first para. Again, it's not about the one or the other. Nintendo's Wii/DS strategy works wonders for the blue ocean market, but it is not working for the red ocean. Also, better graphics does not always require expensive console. The proof was the gamecube. Sure the PS3 and 360 took it too far, but Nintendo could have offered a happy medium that would have secured the multi-plats early on. That didn't happen. The hope is that the Wii U can pick up where it's younger brother left off.
