| ioi said: I thought I'd re-post this from another thread as I hope it will lend some perspective to things in reply to "PS4 already has this generation won": Nobody is denying that the PS4 is winning at the moment. The point is that you have no idea what will happen next year, the year after and so on. At least one platform should hit 100m units this generation - that is still at least 95m units to go for all three and a lot can happen in the meantime. PS4 has a lot of hype and saw a record-breaking launch (although not that far ahead of Xbox One) but it is a marathon not a sprint. If Xbox gets more must-have exclusives in the next few years then it has every chance of pulling ahead. If Nintendo can get their act in gear and market Wii U like they marketed the original Wii then sales could pick up considerably. Nintendo sold more than 50m Wii units on the back of Wii Sports and Wii Fit alone - a couple of enormous mega-hits that cross over into the mainstream media like that could easily swing the fortunes of one platform or another. If you look at the USA graph above (which I will re-post below):
Years 2-4 Wii dominated and years 5-8 Xbox 360 dominated. Why? Motion controls / Kinect. Xbox wasn't too far ahead of PS3 until year 5 then with the release of Kinect (and opening up the platform to the enormous casual market - lower price obviously helped here) then Xbox was able to gain a whole new segment of the market that had previously been with Nintendo. I'm afraid they key to mega success in this industry is the casual market - hardcore gamers will only get you 2-5 million sales fora game . The mega-hits all cross over into the casual audience (GTA, COD, FIFA, Madden, NBA, Wii Sports, Wii Fit etc) - you only have to look at more than 50 million people PER DAY (100m per month) that play Candy Crush to know how enormous this audience is. Nintendo captured a segment of that in 2006 to 2009 with Wii, Microsoft did the same (to a lesser but still significant extent) in 2010 - 2012 with Kinect (and cheap bundles) and in 2012 - 2013 that market has moved very much to tablets with Candy Crush, Clash of Clans and so on. The winner this generation will be whoever can lure that audience back to their platform most effectively over the next 3-4 years (which is clearly what Nintendo attempted with the Wii U tablet but has yet to really make work). The hardcore gaming audience is only enough to get you maybe 50m units sold - to go beyond that you will need something extra - the first to come up with that will be the "winner". This generation hasn't even started yet. |
Yeah, but let's be clear about one thing: Wii U is coming in 3rd/last place. There's nothing that can change that. Motion control phenomenon was a fad and no game based on that will resurrect Wii U.
