Wii sales are not driven by games

[Millennium]

Pristine20 said:
The reason there are sales boosts when certain series are released is because some fans wait for their favorite series to release before taking the plunge while the "non-gamers" keep the wii afloat for the rest of the year.

Actually, no. The Wii's sales pattern has, except as a matter of scale, been the norm throughout the industry for every generation before this one. When system-seller games are released, there's a major spike in sales for a few weeks which dies back, but sales never quite go back to the levels they were at before the game is released. System-seller games gave a permanent uptick to system sales until the consoles went into decline.

Only in this gen, and then only with the HD consoles, are we seeing this pattern fail to manifest: even the most hyped "system seller" games fail to have any lasting effect. Why? My theory on this is that HD console gamers are treating their consoles as investments: they buy the consoles early on in the hope of good games coming out later. I don't claim to understand why they do this, but it's a matter of public record that GTA4, MGS4, and Halo 3 were touted as the main reasons to buy their consoles long before the games themselves were released, and FFXIII is still treated this way. As a result, these games have already sold most of the consoles they're going to sell before the games themselves come out, and so sales crash back to "normal" relatively quickly. But the Wii hasn't seen this behavior: people still tend to wait for big-name games before buying, but when they do the sales don't go back down.

But what I don't understand is why HD gamers are treating their consoles as though they were stocks and bonds. They're game consoles, people. Get them when they have what you want.