Occasionally it's claimed that the Wii is primarily being purchased by casuals, etc, but no one seems to really know how its market breaks down.  Is it stealing PS3/360 sales or is it just expanding the market? 

Can we tell anything about the Wii's demographics by looking at past generations?

Say we pulled up PS2, GC, and XBox charts and compared to PS3, Wii, and 360 charts.  Given that the early adopters of last generation were overwhelmingly 'hardcore', wouldn't we expect at least as many of the early adopters of this generation to be 'hardcore'?

Here's the current generation in the US: http://www.vgchartz.com/hwcomps.php?cons1=Wii&reg1=America&cons2=PS3&reg2=America&cons3=X360&reg3=America 

Here's the last generation: http://www.vgchartz.com/hwcomps.php?cons1=GC&reg1=America&cons2=PS2&reg2=America&cons3=XB&reg3=America 

First, it's convenient that the PS2 launched a year before the other two.  Second, we note that a few more consoles had been sold by this time last generation than have been sold now.  That's just odd.  It may be due to the higher price point, but I find it likely that the difference is that the PS2, the fastest selling console of the generation, was the first released last gen while the Wii, the fastest selling console of this generation, wasn't released until last Christmas.

Instead, we can try to roughly compare individual consoles.  If we look at the 360 and original XBox (http://www.vgchartz.com/hwcomps.php?cons1=X360&reg1=America&cons2=XB&reg2=America&cons3=XB&reg3=America&align=1),  we note that they're almost neck and neck at this point, although the 360 looks likely to pull ahead in the near future.  So there hasn't been a loss of 360 consumers to the Wii, though it also hasn't gained anything to date, which is curious.

That leaves us with the Wii and PS3 and the PS2 and GC.  Unfortunately, it's not very enlightening to compare the two to their previous iterations - if anything, the Wii is more like the PS2.

In an attempt to cancel out the PS2's extra year of sales, we compare the PS2's first six months and the GC's first six months against the Wii's and PS3's first six months, we see something interesting.

First, the PS3 is essentially tracking the Gamecube, with slightly fewer sales.  Second, the Wii essentially tracks the PS2, with slightly more sales.

I don't see how we can escape the conclusion that, unless the market shrank (which would be very surprising), Wii early adopters are demographically similar to the early adopters of the last generation.  It's clear that generally higher prices may be scaring away some past early adopters, but the XB/360 provides a good control for this, since it was selling before the Wii/PS3 were announced, and because the 360 sold about as well as did the XB (and had shortages, if I recall).

Interesting and compelling. Seems like a reasonable suggestion.

Hmm, I'm not entirely sure. I believe the early adapters of the PS2 wanted to buy the PS3-but scared away from the high price point. That and the competing 360 stole some market share away from the PS3. The early adopters of the Gamecube will most likely adapt to the Wii, not 100% but the majority of them. So really, the high sales of the Wii are based on Gamecube people and all of the casual gaming crowds everyone hears about. The PS2 early adapters are split. Some went and bought the PS3, some went for the lower priced 360, and the others simply decided to wait. Of course, some might decided to get a Wii instead. I have nothing to back this up so it is merely a thought.

The real question is what will the Wii's demographic be in the future.

I was an early adopter of a PS2 (about 6 months after launch if I recall correctly).

I was also a later adopter of the GC, after it was out at least 1 if not 2 years. (Technically, the GC was purchased for my daughter, but we play each other's systems).


For this generation... I am an early adopter of the wii (had one late December, and it's *mine*, but of course everyone in the family uses it. It seems to attract dozens of different guests on a weekly basis, which rarely happened with any of the other systems.


I have no interest in the 360 (because of MS). Would be interested in the PS3, but not with so few (to me) interesting games it has, and most importantly not with it's price. I may consider it in a year or two if the price comes down below $300 and if it has a better library of games.

Hope that helps your analysis about the demographics.

But how many could plausibly have been scared away? As the 360/XB comparison shows, the 360 didn't manage to pick up many sales that the XB didn't get - in fact, if you look at the first year or so only, the 360 trails the XB. It's only barely ahead now.

The Wii-GC difference in the Americas at this point is 1.6m, or about as many as the GC had sold by that point. The XB-360 difference is pretty negligible, and the PS3-PS2 difference is -1.5m, or about as much as the PS3 has sold to date.

So what could be going on there? Were fully half of PS2 early adopters scared away from every system this gen? And why would they be? How many people here buy systems at launch, and how many of them have changed brands as the years go by?

Regardless, I don't think that the Wii's market is nearly as casual as it's often made out to be. About half of the Wiis sold have presumably gone to a Gamecube early adopter type crowd, leaving half, or about 1.6m, Wiis to account for.

Remember that the market almost never shrinks, and for it to shrink by 1.5m by this point, or about 25% (off the top of my head), is almost unthinkable. Let's be conservative and say that only half of the people turned off by the PS3 (1/4 of the PS2 early adopters) ended up picking up a Wii and that the hardcore market has shrunk by about 12%. That still seems unlikely to me, and it leaves us with 75% of Wiis in the hands of traditional early adopters.

Edit:  Of course, this is all for the Americas only.  I hope that there's universal agreement that the traditional gamers of Japan have opted for the Wii, else the market has essentially disappeared.

There was never such a big price difference last gen, comparing them to the past is some what pointless. Price difference is way more now.

now 250 - 600
last gen 200 - 300

This is kind of hard to think about, and I was thinking world wide. Starting from the 360 launch in 2005 to now, how many consoles (Wii, 360, PS3) have been sold so far? 22 million? how many PS2s, Xboxes, and Gamecubes have been sold in that same timeframe starting with the PS2 launch (I might wonder about the Dreamcast but that complicates things even more). If the 6th gen sold more in the same time frame, that would mean the hardcore market shrunk in the early stages- if it's more, Nintendo's strategy is working. If it's the same, casual gamers replaced some hardcore gamers in buying the consoles. But still, my reasoning is not perfect.

Btw, Microsoft must have stolen some of Sony's market (I certain at least some Sony fanboys defected)

For me, I bought a Wii when it came out and recently bought a PS2. The last console I owned was the NES and I was PC gaming ever since with RTS games.

Its easy to say why the difference in sales. Wii is far more appealing to the casual gamer that bought the PS2 for GTA, Smackdown, WE, Madden, etc than a $600 console that doesn´t offer anything different besides graphics ( for a casual gamer) And the biggest part of ps2 owners were casual gamers, just check the software sales.

To me, the best argument to support the hypothesis that a majority of Wii owners are casuals, are the games being purchased right now. Conversely, the best argument to reject this hypothesis is the buying process itself.

If it really is true that, for months, and in some places even now, the Wii was simply impossible to find, no way are casuals the ones buying it. I don't consider myself a casual gamer, and I would never wake up early to get one, much less wait in line - I'd do that for food, not a Wii.

The truth is probably somewhere in between. Households are for the most part not composed of just one person. I bought a Wii, but my girlfriend plays it too, and I'll buy her games. That's a big part of why I finally decided buy it: it's something fun we can do together (and it plays games too!) A teenager can go the extra mile to get one, and might try and convince his parents that it's good for them too (specially if that helps getting them to pay for the damn thing), and his sister will probably end up playing too. Grandpas buy it for obvious reasons and end up playing it anyway.

The same Wii can be owned by both audiencies at the same time.