Shadow1980 said:
I had my reply mostly finished yesterday morning after working on it a bit Monday night after work, but there was a power outage and I lost everything I had written. I'll try my best to replicate what I had. That 5% figure was just me spitballing. And I flubbed the numbers slightly, as I was using Gen 7 LTD sales as of March 2012 instead of January. The survey was published in March, but it specified the number of owners "as of January 2012." Bit of oversight on my part. It may be only two months, but given the state of console sales in the U.S. in early 2012 (total 360+PS3 sales were over three times that of Wii sales) it does nudge the figures by several points. Instead of the percentage of Wii owners owning a 360 and/or PS3 being 62.2%, it should be 58.1%. And that may explain why that percentage was at most only 40% in 2009. I know it's just anecdotal, but I bought my 360 in 2007, but I didn't own a Wii until 2009. Waiting until later in a gen to get a second console probably isn't unusual. In any case, we don't know what the actual overlap is. But let's play with those numbers to see what other results we get. If the percent of 360-owning households in the U.S. that owned a PS3 rises to 10%, then percent of Wii-owning households that own a 360 and/or a PS3 drops to only 53.8%. Even if the former increases to 20%, the latter declines to 45.4%. For the vast majority of Wii-owning households to not own either a PS3 or 360 it would require a very large overlap. But even 20% of 360 owners owning a PS3 seems kind of high considering the redundancy between the two. It's not impossible, but more unlikely than lower figures. It is probably higher than 5%, but I doubt it's something like 20+%, either. And once we figure in Nintendo loyalists who buy every Nintendo system and only buy Nintendo systems, that's likely to still propel the percentage of Wii owners that were core gamers to over 50%. And of course this is all assuming that Nielsen is only counting just the Wii, 360, and PS3. It's not clear if they were counting the DS and PSP as "consoles," but if they were then the Wii↔PS360 overlap may be even higher. While you're right that households aren't the same thing as individual owners, I imagine it doesn't make a huge difference. There probably wasn't a huge percentage of Wii buyers getting one for, say, live-at-home grandparents. While non-gamers in the household may have gotten into playing the Wii, I still think there's a good argument to be made that most people that owned a Wii were core gamers. Even Nintendo stated that the average age of Wii players was 29, about the norm for the average gamer. Granted, that was a year after the Wii was released and that could have changed, but I doubt it shot up so high as to indicate large swaths of octogenarians getting in on the craze. There was another Nielsen survey measuring time spent playing on particular consoles by age and gender (download the PDF further down the page for details), and while it implied that the Wii was more popular among players aged 35+ and among women based on the metric being used, there was nothing to indicate that the Wii's demographics were drastically different from that of the PS3 & 360. Since you brought up the kind of games people bought on the Wii, while the Wii series was very popular, it's worth pointing out that several of them benefited from heavily bundling. Wii Sports owed nearly all of its sales to bundling (its global attach rate was 81.6%, but in Japan where it wasn't bundled the attach rate was only 29.3%). Wii Sports Resort also benefited from heavy bundling as it became the new pack-in in May 2010, less than a year after its release. Wii Play was essentially a $10 mini-game collection bundled with a Wii Remote. Why not spend $60 instead of $50 and get some extra games along with a second controller? Wii Fit succeeded on its own merits, though, as it was bundled with a peripheral made just for it rather than the system or a general purpose controller. If we assume zero overlap between people who bought Wii Fit and Wii Fit plus, 43% of Wii owners had one or the other; it's likely a rather high overlap, but even if it was 100% overlap that still means 22.3% of Wii owners had Wii Fit, and I imagine non-gamers were a decent chunk of Wii Fit buyers. Finally, Wii Party didn't have nearly the attach rate because it wasn't bundled with anything. But what about other games? Outside the Wii Series, the Top 10 best-selling games on the Wii were Mario Kart, New SMB, Smash, Mario Galaxy, Just Dance 3, Mario Party 8, Twilight Princess, Galaxy 2, Mario & Sonic at the Olympics, and either DKC Returns or Mario & Sonic at the Winter Games. One third-party party game, one or two Sega-made Nintendo-Sonic crossover sports games, and the rest were perennial Nintendo franchises. The top-selling first-party titles on Nintendo's home consoles, excluding those spent most of their lives bundled (e.g., SMB, SM World, Wii Sports), typically had an attach rate in the 30-40% range since the N64. MKWii and NSMBWii were at 36.7% and 29.8%, respectively. Speaking of attach rates, the Wii had an overall attach rate comparable to other Nintendo home consoles. Even excluding Wii Sports, its overall attach rate was over 8.2 games per system, just ahead of the NES, and second only to the GameCube. While the Wii Series did bring in a significant periphery demographic, there's little to suggest that the vast majority of Wii sales came from non-gamers. Whether it's the Wii's overall sales trajectory, or what other kinds of games aside from Wii Sports and Wii Fit did on the system, or the general spending habits of the average Wii owner (~$650 spent per system, assuming $250 for the system and $50 for each game times eight gamers per system excluding Wii Sports), there's really not anything too far out of the ordinary with the Wii. Finally, regarding the Aug. 2014 Nielsen survey, while the percentage of PS4 owners that owned a Gen 7 console going to 17% then to 9% in Jan. 2015 does seem odd, upon further inspection the disparity comes down to different questions being asked. While the Jan. 2015 survey asked "Which of the following video game systems have you ever owned?", whereas according to the original article reporting on the Aug. 2014 survey "it asked only what consumers currently owned at the time of the survey." I would like to see the full data on that Aug. 2014 survey just to see a detailed breakdown. Unfortunately, none of the news outlets reporting on it link back to Nielsen, and Nielsen's website doesn't appear to have it, either, so my curiosity will remain unsatisfied. |
We need to know the number of PS360 owners to figure out what percentage of Wii owners own another system. 5% seems crazy low to me. Data on PS4/Xbox One ownership indicates that's also not the case.
Dismissing Wii Sports as selling only because it was bundled is ignoring the possibility that a lot of people bought the Wii because it was bundled with Wii Sports, which is part of what we're trying to get at. Wii Sports sales in Japan gives us a baseline, but it's quite probable that Wii Sports would have sold better in other regions, and there's a lot of data to support that. For example, in 2012 when Mario Kart was by far the more common bundle (I don't believe Wii Sports was even really available at that point as a bundle) Wii Sports sold 1.5 million units, with 2 million Wiis being sold. Even if half of the Wii Sports sales were bundled, then about half of the people who bought a Wii in 2012 wanted Wii Sports. And if the ratio was actually 70%+ (which I believe it was) then even more people wanted Wii Sports.
As for the other games selling on the Wii, they are similar to what sold on other Nintendo consoles, but they can't literally be the same people who bought other Nintendo consoles, because of the math. So, Wii gamers ultimately wound up with similar tastes to other Nintendo fans, but obviously something helped bring in more people.
But, most of this is kind of tangential in the question of the evolution of the market. The question that's more relevant to me is what happened to that fanbase.
100% of Wii owners were gamers, whether they were before of after they got a Wii, and the question is whether they stayed gamers. There's evidence to show a decent amount went on to buy a PS41, but that would still indicate a huge drop off. If those gamers stayed in the market, a large chunk would have to be gaming on the Switch, which I think is largely supported by the evidence.
