Posting in the bi-weekly "Wii is doomed! DOOOoooooomed!!" thread.

Anyway, as I've said before, we can judge the Wii's 3rd-party performance when it actually gets good 3rd-party games. Zack & Wiki is a good start.

 You mean from a "spin" perspective? Seriously, we're talking about sales. Is the Wii bubble about to burst? Developers don't care about "attach rates", they care about sales. Specifically, they care about sales of the games they make. Right, or did I misconstrue what you were saying?

It is not a stupid argument. Say that a company needs 300k copies sold to make a profit. If they release it on the PS3 and sell 250k copies, they have an attach rate of 4.9%. If they release it on the Wii and sell 350k copies, they have an attach rate of 2.8%.

Now go and tell a company that attach rates is more important and to look at the number of copies sold is a stupid argument.

I think there is a Wii bubble merely, because the systems sales exist outside of market forces. The only region where the system actually seems to respond to market forces is Japan. So I actually think the bubble burst there. See this is the twisted logic at play in this thread. You cannot excuse the sales in Japan. While not explaining why the same is not happening in other territories. No region has a particularly healthy library, or a number of powerful releases. However in Japan that can drive sales down, but in North America they remain the same.

The system is not affected by market conditions. Game launches seem to have no significance. A lack of titles the same. A competitor got perhaps the most successful game of the year. The sales they did not even blink. Price changes on the other consoles no change. Nothing changes the sales of the Wii outside of Japan. To me that means the system is selling off of original demand rather then new demand or momentary demand. The demand is a carry over from last year rather then something done this year. However one thinks that eventually that initial demand will be satisfied.

Once that happens in your region the bubble has broke that simple. Does that mean the sales will instantly go shitty. Who knows one way or the other, but by that point the system should be part of the current market rather then one nine months old. The Wii seems to be trading on the current market in Japan now. While not excessively dominant it stills looks to be doing pretty well for itself.

We might actually have a good measuring stick in Japan. To Judge how the Wii will do once it has satisfied that original demand, but sadly the fanatics are just looking to shout down anything that might be remotely negative.

Dodece, the only place I disagree with your last post is on "initial demand." While it's true that sales have never slowed down or so much as batted an eyelash with huge game releases and price cuts from the competition, I don't think everyone who's buying a Wii today is buying it for Wii Sports and Twilight Princess. Other games have been released and will be released during the holidays, which have created additional demand beyond what existed at launch. Word of mouth has also created additional demand -- as more and more Wiis get out there, people have their friends over and play, and that creates more demand.

The question is whether new demand is being created at a faster or slower rate than product shipments. My guess is the latter, but not by much. Mario Galaxy and other holiday titles could change that, and titles launching early next year could keep the wave going even further. Still, I agree that at some point, supply will catch up, and sales will decrease.

Dodece makes very good points, and I agree the 'Bubble' that he was talking about was that never ending sales pattern which is continuing in the US.

I think the US is more respondent to that.

The DS is a good example. it performs better in Japan because it suits the Japanese culture much better than it does in NA.

Where as the Wii performs better in US because it suits the US culture much better...

I don't know if the bubble will ever burst in the USA - the initial launch demand isn't so much of a factor, it's just that every month those 400 - 500k consoles go into peoples homes, each of them is shown to 2 or 3 new people, which creates a further 500k a month who want to buy the system - the 'vibe' on Wii is that positive away from 'core' gaming markets.

The initial launch demand is not so much what is driving sales, but Wii Sports is still the main killer app system seller.

The next one that will bolster the demand further will be Wii Fit and SMG will continue to push the gaming population to the console.

Someone said something about 4 segments of the market, which is very accurate...

I'm not sure about Japan but it's not doing so great at the moment, and I believe software is going to be the key driving factor for that now. Wii Fit coming out on Dec 1 in Japan is a very important thing and will 're-start' the surge there (I don't believe that Galaxy is the surger).

Section by Section Breakdown of the Article

Recent suggestions that the high-flying Nintendo Wii's days at the top of the console sales charts may be numbered are beginning to look less ridiculous every day, as more people in the know come round to that point of view.

The latest naysayer to pitch in is heavyweight business newspaper The Nikkei in an analysis piece headlined 'Software Houses Miscalculate Audience, Demand For Wii'. In the subscription-only article, author Tomoyuki Kawai reflects on a range of concerned voices within the videogames industry.

1) Naysayers are nothing new, so nothing to really talk about here

Nintendo the only winner

One of the prime worries seems to be that, while it's true the Wii has driven up software sales for the industry as a whole, Nintendo has been the only real beneficiary because it has been best placed to analyse demand from early adopters and deliver the hits.

Other software houses have been less agile and many have ended up with flop titles on their hands. The result for them has been no overall increase in sales compared to the previous year and a reluctance to commit to the Wii platform.

2) Basically I am hearing the same things we have been hearing for months here. But wait...whats that Nintendo is the primary beneficiary??? ...Uhm....yeah..of course Nintendo is positioned to have the biggest impact, its their hardware, they got a headstart, they have more data, more experience, and *gasp* they make good games? Amazing, good job columbo you solved the murder!

Wii gathering dust?

The report goes on to discuss the likelihood that many Wiis are gathering dust in owners' cupboards, citing one software house president as saying, "People bought it out of curiosity, and it's likely a lot of them haven't used it."

Given that September saw Wii sales fall sharply in Japan for the second consecutive month, it seems reasonable to speculate that the bubble inflated by the novelty factor is starting to deflate, but writing Nintendo off at any stage is a perilous course to steer.

3) So wait...Nintendo is enjoying increases in software sales and still you are saying many Wiis are gathering dust? Which is it? One minute the excuse is you can't sell 3rd party games because people are having so much fun with the Nintendo games and next you can't sell 3rd party games because nobody is even playing the console?

Conclusion:

This sort of nonsensical double talk is exactly the kind of stuff that people were writing around launch time and its the kind of stuff they are going to continue to write probably until the end of the generation. Haters hate, and it should come as no surprise to anyone that consoles aren't excluded from this tradition.

Now, if you want to say the "constantly sold out" bubble is about to burst, you may be correct. But personally I think it will still be pretty hard to find in the US until '08. After that it really depends on how well wii fit does and how well the console does in the media over the holidays etc. If Nintendo gets a bunch of press about being the "hot" item for the year it could drum up even more interest. But most importantly, and I have said this before, I think when little Billy and little Timmy open their Wii in front of the extended family and plug it in, the entire family is going to get an opportunity to see the console in action and from day 1 that is exactly the type of thing that has been selling the console.

Obviously the Wii is in a delicate situation, this just illustrates how there is no easy rise to glory over night, even for Nintendo. The Wii still carries with it the baggage of the GC's lack luster success and the stigmas which still haunt Nintendo. Furthermore the market's lack of readiness for the Wii has resulted in a mess of sorts with developers either scrambling togethern flash-in-the-pan under worked games or boring kiddy tripe which tries to placate to the popular image of the Wii and Nintendo userbase.

Many developers had already started developing high graphic games for the highly anticipated PS3 before the Wii launched not knowing the far more modest Wii would take the spot light instead and now are left with massive projects which have to either be ported to the 360 or expensively scaled down for the Wii throwing away much of their hard work. This problem leaves companies like Capcom in a predicament of having games such as DMC4 and RE5 that would have done wonderfully on the Wii but now its too late to uninvest all the time and money they've put into these graphical powerhouses.

The Bubble is not going to burst but this is going to be a far from smooth road for the Wii and it will easily be another year if not longer before we see the Wii hit its full stride and achieve full acceptance from all third party developers. Much is against the Wii. A lack of a hard drive protects the Wii from lazy development and patches, but also limits downloadable content hindering its standing as a true cross platform option. Motion controls are a tricky new factor to handle properly for if done poorly or overused they can ruin even the best of games. The graphics, while acceptable are a nuisance to developers who are handicapped from being able to port the same game to all three consoles. There are many obstacles holding the Wii back and its road to success may be even more rocky than the original Playstation's but I have no doubt it will persevere.

PS3's best-selling 3rd party game sold 0.57 million. The Wii has five 3rd party games that sold more than that. I'd say 3rd parties are doing pretty well on the Wii, if their games are selling more and cheaper to develop.

Everything else you said Onimusha12 I pretty much agree with, but you say the above quote as if it's a bad thing for the Wii, which is understandable. However, what you said I think are some of the main things that have become wrong and bad about console gaming with the introduction of consoles such as the 360 and PS3, especially the PS3.

Developers ARE becoming lazy if they're now going full out saying stuff like "we need blu-ray", or "we can't patch this". It's a testament to developers just not bothering with true format optimisation and product testing like they have done in previous generations, I hope the Wii will begin to encourage this more.

If the 360 and PS3 encourage console gaming to become more like PC gaming, then alot of players are going to be annoyed with games that rely heavily on internet connections to get the most out of their titles, or go home with a new game only to have to wait for a patch to download. While these processes are in the end automated, they're still nothing more than inconveniences and developers need to stop.

They also need to stop with all this 'uncompressed 7.1 audio in 5 different langauges over 10 hours worth of cut scenes' crap too. It doesn't make the core game any better though does it?! Audio and video data is taking up more storage than the game itself, and they have the cheek to say that their titles are impossible on other platforms when they're not even bothering to work with what they already have. Grrr... rant over