First blog (so please be gentle with me
)
Where do I start? The Wii is in massive demand around the world. They're flying off the shelves as soon as they hit them.
Now consoles have a bit of a minefield when they're released. Long gone are the days where a few children/gamers may or may not decide to buy them.....now many many more people want them.
This is two pronged. When I were a lad, I used to run around outside with my friends. There were woods round the back of our house, and we'd regularly go exploring. There was also a pond and stream there. What is it with kids and ponds and streams and falling in and reed-boat racing
.....but I digress.
The point is that whereas
I would go out to enjoy myself as I was growing up, if I had kids of my own now, I wouldn't let 'em out anywhere without one of these guys to accompany them:
which means kids nowadays spend a bit more time indoors than I used to.
The second reason is that the Wii has, quite simply, made gaming accessible to everyone.
Remember, gaming started out as family orientated (eg, look at the Atari 2600 system), and then migrated to a younger audience with the nes/master system etc etc (those of you that had one were young then). The milestone of the PS2 (certainly touted at the time) was that Sony moved the market into the 20's gamers. It was a master stroke and ensured an explosion of new genres (eg driving simulators like GranTurismo, 'gangsta' games like GTA etc etc), that previously may not even have appeared on the PC. It also ensured the success of the PS2.
Now the Wii has taken the next step and opened up the audience to...well....pretty much
everyone.
From really young kids who might enjoy the mindless simplicity of
WiiPlay, to more seasoned gamers who may be playing
Zelda, all the way through to
old-timers who fancy a trip down the bowling alley a la WiiSports.
I was in Gamestation the other day and was told that for the first time in memorable history, girlfriends and wives are buying games
for themselves 
.
Whereas before, when spending close to 40squid on a game, the other half would look at you with that withering "bloody child, why don't you just grow up and stop wasting your money", you're now likely to get a nod of approval at the least (when she finally stops to let
you play that is
)
I myself stood next to an elderly lady gushing to her friend in Game about the virtues of Wii:
Lady "Oooh yes, this is that fancy new game thing."
Friend of Lady "What is it"
Lady "Well, you move the remote about like you would a real thing, so in tennis, you play like in real life. You don't press any buttons or have to learn anything complicated".
Friend of Lady "That sounds good"
Lady "Yes, and the kids will love it too...."
Think about it for a second...the market that's been tapped here is MASSIVE.
The PS3 and 360 are designed for Gamers. The Wii is designed for
everyone.
And my point is?
Well, according to
Video Games Charts, the Wii has nearly got to 6million sold. The site makes a differentiation between what is shipped and what is sold. For instance, Sony insists it has sold 4million PS3's. What this means is that it has sold 4million units
to retailers. The retailers have sold just over 2million of these units to us. It's
this figure that is important. Some detractors point out that many of the sold units were sold on ebay (and therefore the PS3 has sold even less). However, this doesn't mean anything really. The people who bought those from ebay were (presumably) buying them to play, so the overall figures of "sold to the public" reamin about the same.
Here are the figures from VGcharts:
There is an alternative site called Next Gen Wars, that gives these figures (but doesn't go into detail about how it came to those figures, unlike the first link):
360: 10,735,413
Wii: 5,002,824
PS3: 1,590,616
Both sites stress that these are educated best guesses and vgcharts uses data from the sales industry to support its claims.
What does this mean? Well, if you look at the numbers it means that Nintendo has managed to make and sell over half as many consoles in four months as M$ did
in over one year. That's a BIG amount, over twice the rate of 360 in fact (ninty=1.43million/month, whereas MS=0.59million/month).
This makes me think that the percieved shortage of Wii's is less due to poor response from Ninty, and more due to excessively high demand.
At current growth rate, by the Summer, the Wii will be the number one console.
Which is to be expected when you've opened up the market to everyone.
It's helped by the fact that the Wii is considerably cheaper than the other two 7th gen offerings, meaning that they're
even more appealing to the otherwise non-gaming population.
Now many people who
are gamers will also buy a Wii
in addition to one or both of the other consoles.
Master stroke number 3 from Nintendo....despite it's "on-paper" graphical/processing inferiority, they'll
still get sales from people who have the competitor.
So let's put this into perspective: Ninty has created a product that;
because of its price may
steal sales from it's competitors
because of its price again, may add to sales
alongside its competitors
and because of its
innovation can market itself to buyers the competitors can only dream of.
....and big sales means continued support from developers all wanting to get in on the action
....all of which means it's looking good for us Wii'ers and I'm sure we'll have lots of fantastic games to look forward to on the horizon
Sales of Wii
Lies, damned lies and statistics :-)
Linear Mode
