Inevitably, and for reasons explained many times on here, the Wii bubble has finally burst. In the half year to the end of September sales were down by 40% compared with the year before. Nintendo president Satoru Iwata has no option but to admit: “Wii has stalled” he even admitted that the price drop has failed to arrest the decline: “With the price drop, sales returned to a certain level, but they just did not reach the level of last year around this time”. Which was all as inevitable as night follows day.

The Wii has had its popularity and life massively extended by the Balance Board and Wii Fit, but there are only so many overweight middle aged women willing to pay so much in a feeble attempt to assuage their vanity. So it looks like this market is exhausted, much to the dismay of the many publishers who thought that this was a bandwagon they could jump on. The reality is that the Balance Board is panning out as being the Reebok Step mark 2.

It doesn’t help that you can buy a vastly better machine, the Xbox 360, for less money. Even Sony have tried to be more price competitive and have improved their act in many other ways. Both these machines are introducing gesture interfaces that will finally remove the Wii’s main trump card.

It has to be said that the Wii has done video gaming a massive amount of good. It has taken the medium to new markets and new demographics, vastly expanding it for everyone’s benefit. They have introduced new genres of games and extended old genres in a prodigous burst of creativity. And they have continued in their fine tradition of production values that put most of the rest of game publishing to shame.

So what is going to happen? Well it is a golden opportunity for Microsoft (and to a lesser extent Sony) to make hay whilst the sun shines. They can fill the vacuum that Nintendo have created. They need to give tens of millions of Wii owners a compelling reason to upgrade and I am sure that their marketing teams are working at doing exactly that. And my prediction still holds that the Xbox 360 will ultimately sell more units than the current non HD version of the Wii.

I don't really know why it would be a Golden Time for Microsoft when they're at the bottom of the barrel and Sony is going to start getting 5 to 10 exclusive Japanese games released in the West (not counting all the ones in Japan) a year for the rest of the gen that the 360 won't get following FFXIII boosting the difference between the consoles to over 5 million in favor of Sony to 1.5 million or less for 360 within the first couple of months of 2010.

OOh double thread going on here! Still as funny as the other thread, BLINDED FANBOY!

Don't we have a thread on this?

EDIT: Yes we do:

http://www.vgchartz.com/forum/thread.php?id=91068&page=1

I giggled at this thread. The Wii will dominate the rest of the gen. It simply has expanded into a market that the PS3 and 360 are just now TRYING to get into.

I am not sure the Wii is dead rather taking a breather. The biggest threat to the Wii is probably not the PS3 or the 360 but Wii2.

Yes.

All I see is the usual overreacting...

But if that's what you wanna believe that's fine. You know, it's all possible. There's a lot we don't know about what the companies will do, how the market will improve or not. Everything is relative.

All I can understand from your post is that you have a wish for things to be a certain way, and that is for the Xbox 360 to be number one. On that note, I'm not in agreement. But again, it's all possible.

No, we probably have fousands of em.

ukeatdabian and Bruce, I leave... a Boot to the Head!