Malstrom's new articles are up

[Alby_da_Wolf]

celine said:

Alby_da_Wolf said:
Although Malstrom is right writing that the new casual market could dwarf the hardcore one, he likes to go over the top and somebody doesn't understand it: no giant meteorite fell on earth selectively making hardcore gamers become extinct, while sparing casual ones' life.
There were roughly 100 million console hardcore gamers and another 100 million PC ones (most probably overlapping with a part being both PC and console hardcore) before Wii, and perhaps now they are even more, as there is a minority of hardcore gamers also in emerging countries.
The long and short of this matter is that casual market is lost for Sony and MS this gen, so they must fight for a limited resource, the hardcore market, while Nintendo is free to do whatever it wants in the new and still unlimited (it isn't, actually, but its limits are very far away, so it can be considered unlimited in the short term) market.

If for Hardcore gamers you mean higher tier users ( like many that attend VG forum ) then your numbers are ridicolous

Example : GTA SA for PS2 sold around 15 million units ( best-selling game on the most successful , unit wise, console ever ) on 130 million PS2 sold to retailer ( real userbase should be lower for example around 100 million ).

Only 15% of PS2 owner bought what is the best selling software on the platform.

Also many high tier user generally buy more than one system per generation ( so you can not add them from GC,XBOX and PS2 )

Last gen consoles sold more than 150 million, including all of the three, PS2, Xbox1, GameCube, and counting these users I oversimplified, including with hardcore gamers, also "traditional" gamers, not hardcore, but liking old school games and controls.  And obviously, as happened with the last gen, the vast majority of these, let's call them so, "not new" gamers will buy a console of this generation much later, when price are more affordable.

Obviously there is a part of these old style gamers that preferred Nintendo last gen too, and it's very likely that they'll do the same for Wii. There is also a part of the old gamers that was really waiting for something new and different, so they'll choose Wii too. But even so, an estimate of 100 million old style gamers on consoles is not outlandish, trying to calculate their number only by GTA SA sales isn't accurate, not everybody likes GTA games, and PS2 alone, even not countin XB1 and GC too, has a games library so wide to address a lot of very different users and tastes, while it's been clear almost since the beginning that Wii is appealing a lot of users that wouldn'have bought a console before, and it's building part of its success on them. conquering completely new users means that the market is expanding, not that old users are disappearing.

However,  while we can decree Wii's success even right now, to say something less vague about PS3 and XBox360 we'll have to wait for both them to have lower prices, and, regarding only PS3, a wider games library, regarding only XB360, greater reliability. Only then they'll have the necessary bases to be able to significantly increase their sales, so we'll be able to accurately judge their success seing if this will happen or not.