Wii is my main console ( i do play a little bit PC, and some DS) and only one i will posess this generation, and i dont even have time to play half the games i want, and there are many i bought i havent finished, so im actually happy, but i do think that 5 procent in your sig is a bit low.

On topic, well im not suprised thats what good userbase does for you, and another reason why so many developers suffer developing on HD console.

Yeah, those of us on VGC that look at the sales estimates here AND have been paying attention should've been aware of this for a while now.

The Wii is a toy, folks. A TOY! A great selling, sometimes fun to play TOY! And there's nothing wrong with that. Except . . .

. . . well, reports like this. People are buying it as if it were a toy instead of the GAME system that it is. So what are 3rd party devs supposed to do??? For the first time in the history of consoles, the top selling console does not sell 3rd party games the way that a top selling console should.

What will that mean for the future health of the industry? A perfect storm is brewing . . .

  i even think that ps3 might be able to catch up to the Wii's milly sellers i even made a thread about it Something to Ponder Wii million sellers vs PS3 milion sellers it's going to be tough to over take the 360 milly sellers

You seem to forget that the Wii's software sales in general are higher than the 360's or PS3's. Above all though, the development costs for the Wii are much lower than on the HD systems.

Developers and publishers on the Wii are doing fine.

I'm not actually sure that's how statistics work, Mr.Stickball, but even if they did there's still the second sentence in that paragraph.

As a lesson to myself, in the future I should finish doing research before making a thread...

http://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/3906/npd_behind_the_numbers_december_.php?page=2

"Nintendo revealed in a recent press release that 132 million units of software were sold for its systems during the year, or just over 49% of all software units sold in 2008. Of that 132 million, we estimate that over 70 million were for the Nintendo Wii...

"Microsoft would have sold...in the neighborhood of 48-49 million units of Xbox 360 software for all of 2008...

"According to software sales figures from Sony, it appears that more than 27 million PS3 software units were sold in 2008."

Crunching the numbers, the "have-nots" on the Wii accounted for 14 million units of software. Assuming the 360 and PS3 are actually at an 80/20 split (and it certainly doesn't sound like they are, since it says they are "closer to" rather than "at" that figure) we get 9.6 million for the "have-nots" on the 360, and 5.4 million for the PS3.

It seems that the Wii remains healthier for the outsiders on the Wii, assuming my math is correct. The pie is much, much larger, so having a slightly smaller share still gets you more in the end.

400+ titles.

i'd say 90% are shovelware not worth buying or shouldn't deserve to sell in the first place.

That leaves 40 games that deserve to sell.

If you look at all the good quality games, they are still low budget, and most of them pick up 500k+ making a decent profit.

This data is very strong support for the "Wii and PS360 are not competing" thread that shows up all the time, honestly.  If the 3rd parties are going to fail by producing gamer games, then they need to produce different kinds of games for the Wii than the HDs, since both appear to have an independant market segment of signifigant magnitude.

The only place the Wii truly "competes" with the HDs, therefore, would likely be in households where both a Wii and a HD console were present, as those people who choose a Wii "over" a PS360 are not even the demographic interested in the PS360 to begin with, apparently.  In other words... the "blue ocean" customers.  And yeah, there are a lot of them.

True, but this topic isn't about 1st vs. 3rd party sales, it's about how so few titles (for all the systems) completely dominate. The situation is just more skewed on the Wii than on the other two. Although crunching the numbers (see my last post) it still seems to favor the Wii...

What's REALLY concerning about this situation (for all systems) is that if you don't have a hit, you're not going to sell many titles. In light of that, is it wise to keep gambling with higher development costs? We're seeing more revenue, but not increasing profits. Or, as the NPD itself puts it, "a rising tide isn't lifting all boats."

But I'm drifting a bit off-topic here.

Er...would you care to provide some proof of these assertions? Because this article doesn't seem to be it (check my response to Mr. Stickball.

See my last post as well.

You are leaving out how many games both Sony and MS realeased as well, which i doubt can even reach the amount on the wii.  The lesser amount of games, the bigger amount the games have to share.

I see a lot of people looking at the effect without paying much attention to the cause. There's still only one publisher who's heavily invested in the Wii, with Sega and a lot of smaller Japanese publishers just now coming on board.

The sales are concentrated because the investment is concentrated. Nobody comes close to spending as much on Wii development as Nintendo. Are they going to compete, or are they just going to let Nintendo have all the cash?