You assume that every PS2 owner is a core gamer? The sales figures invalidate that proposition, as they show that at least 50% of its users bought only one console. The mainstream audience, not the core gamers, powered the PS2's success. These are the people who conspicuously refusing to make good on their mythical "brand loyalty" to Sony and purchase a PS3.

"Well, that does it. If everybody this guy knows is tired of it, the Wii doesn't have a chance."


haha nice one

 So wii is not the casual break through wii fanboys make it out to be, other console has done it.  

It really is just price. 

Sorry to do that, but I never appreciate the anecdotal/personal approach to analysis. Thanks for taking it so well.

Just as a question, do you know why games like Grand Theft Auto and Gran Turismo sold 15 Million copies while games like God of War only sell in the 1 Million unit range?

The answer is casual gamers ...

No, not really. Price is a huge factor, but the Wii is also selling because, above all, it's something different and exciting. Core gamers in general are out of touch with the market on this issue.

I wonder if you realize the conclusion that the bolded portion implicitly endorses.

A lot of casuals (who play a few hours a week) bought PS2, which contributed to its dominance. But those people are not the majority of the whole casual segment (mom kids sisters granpa and the rest). 
Get it?

>>Casual dont buy enough games to be that biog a deal.
You're misinterpreting the argument. I'm not talking about attach rates.  Like I said it's insignificant in terms of the segment size, and the word, insignificant, is used in a relative term not absolute.

If you want to define "win" only in terms of attach rates, be my guest,
although, it's a weird day to define win when you talk about console war. 

Nonquihote's post implicitly reveals such an important bias; he is implying that all PS2 owners are hardcore. His definition of "hardcore" is "Someone who owns a Sony (or perhaps Microsoft) console." 

It's one thing to believe that PS3/360 has more "hardcoreness" in some vague way, implying skill and/or violence and/or male predelictions in game choices. It's quite another to draw a fine line; Playstation owners are hardcore, Nintendo owners are not. Actually, I actually think the arguments are nearly identical, but the more nebulous definitions are simply disguised better.

Indeed, if I remember correctly the Xbox and GC both had higher attach rate than the PS2, due to being limited to mostly a core audience.

This is exactly the type of thinking that makes disruptive technology dangerous to the leaders in a field.  Looking at the book, "The Innovator's Dilemma", we find that disk drive makers on the top of the market knew how to make physically smaller disk drives, but the capacity of these drives wasn't enough to satisfy their target audeince, so they kept building large drives with higher and higher memory capacities.  Meanwhile, small companies with nothing to lose developed the smaller drives with smaller capacities but found new audiences (eg. laptops instead of home PCs) to sell them to.  When those audiences grew, the smaller companies made their drives better until they could match the capacities of the larger drives and eventually overthrew the big companies.

Now we have a similar situation: Sony offers all the same old advantages in order to try and keep its 120 million customers: better graphics, bigger hard drives, etc.  Why would they want to waste their time on fitness games or pet simulators when they know there are 120 million people that will pay for a graphically enhanced Gran Turismo or God of War?  Meanwhile, Nintendo only has 20 million faithful customers left in the home console market so it can afford to make a cheap system with weak graphics and sell it to a small, undefined audience.

As it turns out, just as in the disk drive industry, that small, undefined audience isn't quite so small after all.  It's actually quite lucrative, but neither Sony or Microsoft could have justified a business plan based on selling consoles to moms or girls or lapsed gamers because Sony had to try and protect it's 120 million gamers and Microsoft had to try and steal those 120 million gamers away.