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Soundwave on 13 September 2013
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zorg1000 said:
gigantor21 said:
zorg1000 said:
Cool chart

But one thing I took from this is u cant judge a console by its first year sales. N64 was tracking only 400k behind Wii arlt this point in USA but in the long run only sold about half.

I think these numbers say a lot actually.

According to the chart, the system hasn't come anywhere near outpacing the Gamecube since January. Pikmin was the first game it had that cracked the top 10 in something like 7 months. And it's only sold about half as much as the GC in the same time frame. The PS3 performed much better in its first year despite being a $600 running gag with production problems--it's lowest selling quarter so far was 700k, while the WiiU has seen numbers as low as 160k before it's first birthday.

That's absolutely abysmal. If we're talking about the N64, it's not going to sell much more than that globally at this rate.

If I recall correctly PS3 was tracking behind GC Iin the same time frame and is now 2x GC lifetime sales in USA. Also N64 only tracking 10% behind Wii up to this point then going on to sell less than 50% of Wii lifetime sales in USA. Those 2 things prove that first year sales dont have no bearing on lifetime sales.


There's also never been a console that's sold as poorly as the Wii U out of the gates (from Nintendo or anyone else) in the game industry and gone on to be a relative success.

Even the PS3 at $600 was selling better than this.

Sony always had the safety blanket of virtually all major third party support backing them, all they had to do was get the price of the system down, which was inevitable. Wii U is a far trickier situation for Nintendo.

What they really need desperately is new breakout hit ... something that isn't Mario/Zelda/DK to come out and drive sales of the console to someone other than same group of 20 million Nintendo fans.

That's what Wii Sports did, and while that's probably impossible to replicate, Street Fighter II and GoldenEye are other examples of games that galvanized new audiences for Nintendo and caused a large uptick in sales. You cannot rely on Mario to do everything, all you're going to get is a console with a very narrow fanbase.