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totalwar23 on 21 June 2007
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GotchayeX said:

But how many could plausibly have been scared away? As the 360/XB comparison shows, the 360 didn't manage to pick up many sales that the XB didn't get - in fact, if you look at the first year or so only, the 360 trails the XB. It's only barely ahead now.

The Wii-GC difference in the Americas at this point is 1.6m, or about as many as the GC had sold by that point. The XB-360 difference is pretty negligible, and the PS3-PS2 difference is -1.5m, or about as much as the PS3 has sold to date.

So what could be going on there? Were fully half of PS2 early adopters scared away from every system this gen? And why would they be? How many people here buy systems at launch, and how many of them have changed brands as the years go by?

Regardless, I don't think that the Wii's market is nearly as casual as it's often made out to be. About half of the Wiis sold have presumably gone to a Gamecube early adopter type crowd, leaving half, or about 1.6m, Wiis to account for.

Remember that the market almost never shrinks, and for it to shrink by 1.5m by this point, or about 25% (off the top of my head), is almost unthinkable. Let's be conservative and say that only half of the people turned off by the PS3 (1/4 of the PS2 early adopters) ended up picking up a Wii and that the hardcore market has shrunk by about 12%. That still seems unlikely to me, and it leaves us with 75% of Wiis in the hands of traditional early adopters.

Edit:  Of course, this is all for the Americas only.  I hope that there's universal agreement that the traditional gamers of Japan have opted for the Wii, else the market has essentially disappeared.


This is kind of hard to think about, and I was thinking world wide. Starting from the 360 launch in 2005 to now, how many consoles (Wii, 360, PS3) have been sold so far? 22 million? how many PS2s, Xboxes, and Gamecubes have been sold in that same timeframe starting with the PS2 launch (I might wonder about the Dreamcast but that complicates things even more). If the 6th gen sold more in the same time frame, that would mean the hardcore market shrunk in the early stages- if it's more, Nintendo's strategy is working. If it's the same, casual gamers replaced some hardcore gamers in buying the consoles. But still, my reasoning is not perfect.

Btw, Microsoft must have stolen some of Sony's market (I certain at least some Sony fanboys defected)

For me, I bought a Wii when it came out and recently bought a PS2. The last console I owned was the NES and I was PC gaming ever since with RTS games.