I'm preparing some new metrics for evaluating data to come from Nintendo and Sony this Thursday in the earnings report with shipment data.

One thing that crossed my mind:

Through March 2008, Nintendo had shipped 369.61m games for the DS. For the year ending March 2009, Nintendo expects to ship another 207m DS games, although I suspect they have low-balled this figure by 10 or 15% and will raise it a bit. Assuming I'm right, they'll be near 600m units of DS software shipped through March 31, 2009...and no Nintendo machine has ever seen software shipments over 501m.

In the year ending March 2010, Nintendo should ship another 25-30m DS, so its not hard to imagine another 200m-250m units of software shipped given that the userbase will be pushing 130m by this point. If thats the case, 250m is effectively asking the average DS owner to buy 2 games in a year. Certaintly doable. Beyond this, there should be a fairly steep hardware decline, but I'd imagine DS shipment could be at 150m by March 2011, 163m by March 2012, 170m by March 2013, etc. It could end up at 185m or something. If that is the case, an attach rate of ~6 would just about push well over 1b units of software.

Looking back through NES and SNES and GB hw shipment figures, and estimating attach rates, I'm left with the conclusion that before DS, no Nintendo platform ever saw sw shipments of 100m in a single year. Those platforms nonetheless hit 500m/380m/500m respectively. Wii and DS are both likely two double or triple the peak years for software of NES/GB (much higher HW volumes, lower attach rates than NES) so I'm inclined to believe 1b frankly easily within reach for both systems. Keep in mind that Sony is going to end up shipping 1.5b PS2 games.

I'm actually begginning to believe Wii software has a shot at 2 billion in software shipments as well, given that a) hardware figures are tracking faster than DS at a higher price, and b) people buy roughly twice as many Wii games per Wii as DS games per DS (Q1+Q2+Q3+Q4+Q5+Q6+Q7+Q8 Wii attach rate/ Q1+Q2+Q3+Q4+Q5+Q6+Q7+Q8 DS attach rate is 45 over 23). Through March 2008, Nintendo shipped 177m Wii games. For the year ending March 2009, Nintendo expects to ship 200m Wii games, but I'd wager that they'll beat it by a fair amount. This should put Nintendo at near 400m Wii games shipped as of March 2009.

Would anyone doubt that Wii could top 300m units in software sales next year? Wii and DS software sales are going to be nearly identical in the year ending 2009, even though DS has a base twice as large and sold more to retail in the year by ~10-15%. If Nintendo ships 35m Wiis in a year to end the March 2010 year with 85m Wiis out there, watch out as software shipments are probably going to be spectacular (300m+). The year ending March 2011 or maybe March 2012 is actually when the Wii software peak will be given that the rate at which Wii software shipments is rising has to slow down before it begins to reverse from the peak, and even if the 115 million Wii owners buy three games in 2011 its ~350m. Its hard to imagine Nintendo releasing a new console before 2012 as well, unless someone does a Wii-too type interface.

Realistically speaking, I think we should be expecting DS software shipments to end up at 800m to 1.4b, and and Wii software shipments to end up at 1.3b to 2.5b, although of course the Wii projection is far, far less certain.

What do you all think?

I think the DS has 1 billion pretty much locked, given this years rate of shipments and hardware sales. Wii, easily over 1 billion, but, as you said, harder to find a ballpark figure for a final number.

Seems reasonable, after all the Wii is beting the PS2 in both hardware sales, and attach ratio at this point in it's life.... and the PS2 must now be closing in on 1.5billion units of software.

And yes, I agree the DS 1billion is almost, but not quite, a given figure.... whereas the Wii's 2 billion is more of a good possibility.

You know, after saying almost everything that can be said about a subject, and presenting it in an awesome way, saying "what do you all think" isn't really going to get any more info in.

Well, I actually have something.

Through March 2007, Sony had shipped 1240M software for the Ps2. http://www.scei.co.jp/corporate/data/bizdataps2soft_e.html

That means we can expect it to end at ~ 1.3B software.

Do you really expect the Wii to sell almost 50% more than that (median of your projection).

Looking at it like that, your projection for Wii seems a tad high... I'm not really sure...

Edit: Added a link to my Ps2 shipment claims.

No way. 2 billion is just too much. Also I expect YOY sales of the Wii to decrease because of increased competion from Sony and MICROSOFT as they start targeting more casuals.

You should take your time to look at that link you posted more.... because there is some other info.

First of all alarm bells should be ringing if you think the PS2 hasn't managed to ship 60 million units of software in the last 20 months, and second of all that website gives shipment data for PS2 software (proper, retail shipments) for the last 2 years: http://www.scei.co.jp/corporate/data/bizdataps2soft_sale_e.html

True, the two different types of data should (product shipment and sales to retail) not be put together for making anything accurate, but I am pretty confident that with the last quarter added the sum total of 1240m product shipments, and the last 7 quarters of retail shipments will add up to around 1480 million.

1 Billion Ds Games would actually be possible. I doubt they'd all be sold- i'd have to wager that around 70% would be shovelware. Wii getting in the billions- i just don't see it.

 That doesn't really make sense. Even if the Wii slowed down a lot HW wise (unlikely), its software sales would still increase. The installbase would be increasing still.

Look at the Ps2's sales.

Year 0: 24.9M

Year 1: 100.3M

Year 2: 183M

Year 3: 221M

Year 4: 246M

Year 5: 227M

Year 6: 203M

So even though its HW sales drastically dropped, years 2-6 were generally on about the same lvl for software

PS: My previous ~ 1.3B for software was meant to be ~ 1.4B for software.

Edit: And after reading TWRoO's post, even that seems low.

The PS2 sold a huge amount of shovelware. The top selling system will sell a ton of shovelware, that's just the way the industry works.

All trends and logic point in the opposite direction though.

perhaps MS and Sony competition will increase for 2009 in terms of marketshare. (ie Wii only gets 51% marketshare for the year instead of the 54% it got this year) but there is no way the Wii sales figures will fall compared to 2008. (2008 bagged over 26 million Wiis by the way)