| Shadow1980 said: Since the subject of the Wii's demographics were brought up, while there was clearly a significant periphery demographic, I think there's good evidence to suggest that at least a slim majority of Wii owners were "core gamers." According to a Nielsen survey from March 2012, 56% of households in the U.S. at the time owned a 7th-gen console. After crunching Census Bureau data and NPD numbers, I calculated a consoles-per-console-owning-household ratio of about 1.386-to-1. If we assume that 5% of 360 owners at the time also owned a PS3 (because there had to have been at least some households that owned both), that means that 62.2% of Wii owners were also PS3 and/or 360 owners. Of course, we don't know the true overlap between 360 and PS3 owners, but it's not likely a huge percentage. And if we assume that a large chunk of Wii owners were “core” gamers that are Nintendo fans that exclusively buy Nintendo consoles, that leaves even less room for Wii sales to be attributable to non-gamers. There was another Nielsen study from February 2015 that also suggests a significant overlap between Wii owners and owners of PlayStation and Xbox systems. Nearly three-quarters of PS4 and XBO owners at the time having also owned a Wii. While that was very early in Gen 8, it still supports the idea that gamers were likely the primary audience for the Wii. Nearly a quarter of all Wii owners in the U.S. were early adopters of the PS4 & XBO. Even if the percent of PS4 & XBO owners that owned a Wii has dropped to only a third, that would still mean that nearly half of all them were also Wii owners at some point. Finally, in a Dec. 2007 conference call, former Nintendo of America president and CEO Reggie Fils-Aimé stated that “the vast majority of these people who’ve purchased a system are, so far, active or ‘core’ players.” While that may have changed in the years afterward, the rest of the available data indicates that non-gamers were likely a minority of Wii owners. |
I don't think these numbers work out, at least for our purposes.
The Nielson surveys are dealing with households, which is a bit different than what we're talking about. I'm pretty sure we all mean (at least I did) people who played games primarily on the Wii, since that's really what's relevant if we're trying to figure out what factors are driving the Switch's success.
If we're using households, then a large amount of that ownership is going to be purely incidental. If a person is buying a Switch now, and they lived with their grandma during the Wii days who was one of those octogenarian Wii fans you hear so much about and they never played it themselves, then their Wii ownership didn't really factor into the Switch purchase. Household numbers don't give great insight into what kind of users are buying a console.
And,, I'm not sure about these numbers anyway. If a console owning house generally had 1.38 consoles, That means that there have to be more single console owning houses than double dippers... right? Unless Wii owners are vastly overrepresented among double dipping households, then 62% can't be right.
Which begs the question of whether there was only a 5% overlap between 360 and PS3. Which sounds really sketchy to me. The two systems applied to a similar userbase. I get that they are somewhat redundant, but exclusives and the ability to play with friends who own other consoles would drive it to way higher than 5% imo. And the data we have, if accurate, seems to bear that out. As of 2009 according to NPD, 14% of Wii owners had a PS3 and 26% had an XBox 360. https://www.alistdaily.com/media/most-wii-owners-do-not-own-xbox-360-ps3/ So a maximum of 40% of Wii owners owned one of the other two systems. This number could have drifted up by 2012, but 60% would be really high.
The PS4 data is really suspect to me and wouldn't jive with a 5% PS360 crossover.
Unless I'm missing something, if you add it up you get to about 14 million 7th gen systems among the 6.3 millionish PS4 households in the US which didn't own a 7th gen console. This means either virtually all of them owned two consoles (or alternatively an offsetting number of people owned one and three respectively). That's pretty sus. Of course, these are early adopters though so they're bigger gamers. Still, that number seems crazy high.
But if that number is even remotely accurate, then 5% can't even be close. If there were 5 million households that have a Wii, even if all of those households had a second console, then you're left with about 3.5 million PS3s and 360s among the 1.3 million or so non-Wii owning PS4 households. Even if all 1.3 million of those people owned both systems, there would still be be about 800K left over. Meaning we'd have to have 800K PSWii60 owners which would be about 12% of the PS4 households on their own.
These are early adopters so their habits are going to be different than the entire market, but they can't be THAT far off that a 5% overlap with PS3 and 360 would make sense. So, some figure here is off.
And... according to Nielson the figured were very different in June of 14.
At that point, the number of non gen 7 owners was 17%. Of course, the number could go down over time, but you'd figure the earliest adopters would be the most likely to have been 7th gen gamers, so if anything we'd expect those numbers to be going up and not down.
They also say that 31% of PS4 owners were Xbox 360 or Wii owners that did not own a PS3... If around 60% of PS4 owners in mid 2014 were PS3 owners, and 31% were 360 or Wii owners who did not have a PS3... Then together, that would make about 90%. About 10% of PS4 owners didn't have 7th gen systems... So... that means there would have to be zero crossover between PS3 and Wii/360 owners.
So I dunno. Either these numbers are off, or they're being reported wrong, or the terms are being used in unintuitive manner.
I'd say the best evidence we have if we want to figure out the type of audience is buying which system, the best evidence we have is the games that they're buying, particularly when they're big enough that we're getting figures from the company.
