Mazty said:
Check the link above - 2015 its estimated to overtake DVD and having to reach the same sales as VHS or DVD doesn't mean it's a failure....That would me the wii is a failure as the PS2 sold more, which is obviously not the case. Does their gaming division include revenue from the games sold as well or not? The reason I ask is because you usually here the case that the console is sold at a loss, and profit made from the games, which is reflected by the almost same cash loss MS took with the original xbox. Plus it'd be nice to see the next few years of sales to see how the loss was offset, as well as bluray revenue. If at the end of the day all Sony secured was a)bluray and b)a third of the market, if the PS4 doesn't fare better then it could very well be their last console as making something that doesn't offset it's losses quite clearly is a fail. However, I digress. Go check out the Wii sales yourself - other than selling about 400k extra consoles, the sales are just not there to claim SSBB was a system seller. Popular? Yes. System seller? Not by the looks of it. If you know anyway of getting the figures I'd like to compare the release dates of SSBM to GC sales as that could be interesting. Oh yes nostalgia is a powerful drug, but the issue is those people are growing up and there may not be the same nostalgia-nintendo-infusion going on. During the 5th and 6th gen, gamers tended to have at least one friend who had a Nintendo console. However nowadays kids aren't starting really with the wii, but in their early teens straight away with a 360 or ps3 meaning that they haven't had the nostalgia days of roaming the fields of Hyrule or watching characters ding off the screen in SSB. As much as the wii was a financial success, the achilles heel may be that it broke the nostalgia chain. |
It's not a failure, but Blu Ray isn't the glorious, monumental victory that DVD was for PS2 either.
And a third of the market is a pretty considerable step down from over two thirds.
My point isn't that the PS3 failed, it didn't, but that you aren't applying fair standards of success across consoles. (E.g. Wii U fails for losing a small amount of money, PS3 wins despite losing billions)
Brawl was a gargantuan system seller. There is no doubt at all. If you understand the Nintendo player base, you'll understand that millions of consoles were sold on the promise of that game. A 400k spike on the release date is only the tip of the iceberg, most were sold before that based on hype, and after based on word of mouth and playing with friend's copies. To understand this you need to understand the power of what the game embodies; not only the representation of the childhood/teenage years of millions of gamers thru Melee, but it epitomisation of the local multiplayer casual-core bridging social experience that has been Nintendo's main source of sales since the N64.
And the amount of kids starting with the Wii is huge; don't be fooled into thinking its all senior citizens playing those 30 million plus copies of Mario Kart, or thoe 20 million plus copies of NSMBW.
