pachoo5 said:
I think Wii sales will continue to decline as casuals start buying an almost equally priced Kinect instead of the Wii and current Wii owners upgrade to 360s or PS3s (and former potential Wii owners skip Wii altogether to go 360/PS3).
The Wii has dropped in sales twice in a row:
2008 - 23,998,032
2009 - 21,802,884
2010 - 19,137,679
The trend should continue as I believe the casual market continues to get saturated with Wii units. There aren't many potential buyers left IMO. And, the Wii technology is getting pretty long in the tooth (more and more households are going HD and the Wii just doesn't cut it as a true HD experience).
My 2011 prediction for Wii is that the downward trend in sales accelerates and only 14.5M units are sold worldwide.
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Equally priced Kinect? A Wii for the moment costs 200 bucks and a K360 costs 300 - that's not almost equally priced. Also, current Wii owners don't have much reason to switch to PS3 or 360 since they don't have the software that they probably initially bought the Wii for and Kinect/Move are really just one-upped Wiis so I doubt they'll bother wasting another 300 or so bucks for the experience that they either don't want or already pretty much have.
Also, Wii sales were 24.4m in 2008, mind you (where'd you get 24m?), so the rate of decline is essentially flat YOY. With a price cut, I'd say it's downright certain that Wii will hit 100m by 2012, since that would actually mean Wii declined more in price cut year (2011) than non-price cut year (2010). Also, I think that the casual market is actually much larger than Wii's current sales (200m?) so saturation shouldn't start showing itself much more next year and year after than it has shown this year. Of course, it will get more saturated, but the decline will only stay steady and not accelerate much more I should think.
If Wii's lack of power were to hurt its sales, I think it would have been affected a while ago and wouldn't really start affecting more randomly in 2011 and after. HDTVs have been becoming popular for a couple of years now and it hasn't really impacted Wii's sales too much.