There is no lack of Wii momentum in NA and Others...

But it has been at least four weeks since the Wii has topped the charts in Japan. Is the fad fading? I think it is too early to tell.

Especially, since they haven't let us know their Christmas releases yet. Christmas 2009 will be important for the Wii.

Don't you love analysts who make non-quantifiable predictions? I'd really like it if he clarified what he means in concrete terms.

? Why?

I too would like to see the source.

My guess is it a UK tech-heavy website/publication.

There seems to be a strong anti-Wii bias among high-end technology types there.

And like many arguments against the Wii, the person never let the facts get in the way of a good story.

What is more amazing is that the Wii is doing this well without any first-party software (as it is just now getting third-party worth buying).

Mike from Morgantown

I wouldn't be surprised if Wii sales dip, given the economy. However, the console will continue to sell, and if Nintendo has time to build up extra supply, those consoles might just get sold during the holiday season.

Its easy to point at Japan in the past couple of weeks because the dual reality of the Wii getting no significant games, the console market declining overall, and the competitors getting a handful of heavy hitters, make it look really bad, but you really have to look at the Japanese market in the long-term. Star Ocean 4, RE5, SF4, and Yakuza 3 aren't going to keep PS3 on top forever, especially when Wii has got a pretty long train of titles that the Japanese demand coming, starting in April.

I don't see how this leads to an idea of the bubble "bursting," that all the potential Wii customers out there wake up one day, and unanimously decide they don't want it any more. At the absolute worst, Wii enters into a slow decline. A crash isn't happening.

sales have increased WW and people are asking if the bubble is bursting, lol

There's no way around it. A sustainable console environment cannot hold without industry support for a long time, the consumers may have spoken, but until industry decides there's a place for Wii it can only become a self fulfilling prophecy.

The Wii was going to become the PS2 of this generation, but it depended on its adoption as a leading game platform. And I'm not just talking publishers. Obviously there was tremendous potential for the Wii to continue selling for many years to come, but with all this consistent doubt it will decline. And I think it's getting around that time where whatever was making the Wii successful will fade, and only industry acceptance can bring it back again.

I'm not saying the Wii will permanently decline, but it will suffer a period of unpopularity, perhaps short. It will depend on what the industry wants to do. One thing is for sure, whatever they're hoping will rise will not be sufficient. The industry itself will suffer the most from it, not Nintendo, this is why I believe Nintendo is not done with their current path of videogame leadership.

I suspect the article is UK focused concentrating on the price hike and linking this to Japan and the recent fall off.

UK sales will almost certainly slow with a price hike whether you would call this a bubble that has burst we will have to wait and see.

If sales do drop off significantly for the Wii when this price hike comes through and it is sustained I think you could say the bubble has burst in the UK at the very least. The Wii has broken new ground though and shown itself to be resilient so I would not be at all suprised if someboy found the puncture repair kit shortly afterwards.

Google finds the source pretty easily. It's EDGE.

http://www.edge-online.com/features/has-wii-bubble-burst