Slashdot Mirror
Xbox 360 Wins Through 2009?
simoniker writes "As part of a recent MI6 Conference presentation, IDG's Jason Anderson made predictions on the North American installed base of the next-gen consoles through 2008. He predicts that the Xbox 360 will continue to hold a lead into 2009, with the PS3 just behind and the Wii trailing significantly. In particular: 'In 2008, Anderson suggests 15.5 million units in homes for the Xbox 360, 13.5 million for PS3, and 6.8 million for Wii.' Is the Wii really going to trail by so much, or do the analysts not 'get it'?"
how can they suggest those numbers for the ps3 and wii if they haven't even launched yet?
Problem is, we'll never be able to say, "Hypothetically, if all three had came out at the same time, PS3 would have carried strong through 2009." Why can't we say that? Because we observe one experiment (what really happens) and we have no control over the variables and the control factors in the experiment. You can't apply the scientific process to much of economics so why is it considered a science? Things like the Phillips Curve hold true for 30 years and then suddenly fall flat on their face so now it's not so much a curve as a movable line that can be placed anywhere automagically.
It's almost painfully obvious that there's very little pertinent data to observe to make this assumption about the XBox, so why make any predictions at all?! Oh, that's right, attention & web traffic.
My work here is dung.
I think Game Informer had it right in this month's magazine.
if the more affordable Wii ends up being the second sstem of every PS3 or 360 owner, it's possible that it could make a run at the top spot in terms of installed base
Not that every 360 or PS3 owner will also purchase a Wii, but many probably will. Not to mention the die-hard nintendo fanbase that will buy only the Wii. Also if nintendo's plan for how they intend to market the Wii works out then many non-gamers will be converted by the Wii which adds many additional sales.
But honestly, I don't really care. I'm buying a Wii day one because it's going to kick ass. I probably won't ever buy a 360, but I may buy a PS3 in a few years when the price becomes reasonable.
nil
Only problem is that the Wii isn't the GC. Sure, the proc and graphics may not be a major new innovation, but the hype about the Wii has always been the new controller. Speaking as a marketing student, Nintendo has done a very capable job of marketing the new product, keeping it in the public eye, and giving encouraging price point nods. I predict this analyst prediction will be totally off the wall. Can I get paid too, since I have just as much insight on the yet-to-be-released PS3 and Wii as this writer?
Meh, a real sig would take too long, and I have an MMORPG to play with....
And to think, if you were willing to give up the one or two new games that you are only considering buying you could do the whole thing for the $30 cost of Halo and call it a day.
You are not, by any stretch of the inagination, the intended audience of next gen. consoles.
Rigth now the average gamer doesn't want inovation, he just wants flashy graphics and a good FPS that a noob could pick up and win in, Nintendo is trying to sell in their style, but their style will not match up with the average gamer community
And that's why the prediction is likely wrong: it looks like he's predicting numbers based on what the "average gamer" will do. Nintendo's not targeting the "average gamer". Neither is Sony, for that matter: $500 is outside of what the average gamer will pay for a console.
The "non-gamer" community is still much larger than the "average gamer" community. If Nintendo manages to convince a good portion of them to buy a Wii, they'll dominate in terms of market share.
You'd think they'd be related, or something. :(
My Greasemonkey scripts for Digg &
The quantity question is shaking up to look the same, at least initially, for the next generation. The majority of next generation previews I've seen are for 360/PS3, with an absolute dearth of high profile previews for Wii.
If the quantity of game selection were the sole criteria, I'd say the analyst is roughly right in his predictions at least for the near term. PS3 will have a huge advantage over the 360 in the number of Japanese developed games, so I expect to eventually overtake it.
The obvious wildcards are how successful the Wii will be in expanding the market and bringing back lapsed gamers. And how long will the PS3 sell for a premium. If Nintendo can translate E3 success into actually getting devlopers to release games on the Wii, their chance for success will rise dramatically.
In addition, Nintendo's targeting a demographic which is completely outside previous generations,
Where did you get this idea. They said they wanted to make it accesable for all, a statement they make every release. They have yet to change their tactic of garnering faith with the younger demographic.
I have to agree with the grandparent: how can you make predictions about systems as revolutionary as the PS3 (in terms of price) and the Wii (in terms of target audience)? There's just no information about it whatsoever.
For the PS3, you do price point analysis. The product doesn't have to be the same. You analyze consumer response in comparison to price point increases that are on par with Sony's annouced prcing. This will give you a response trend.
For the Wii, that target audience has been disected like a frog. Kid friendly with a dash of innovation. You may think it is completely irrelevant - but the biggest trends to compare this to is candy. WTF?!!! Yep, candy. Candy started taking an "interactive" and "electronic" aspect about a decade ago. It used to be all Bazooka Joes and Pixie Stix, now its candy that beeps and comes in cool packaging that moves or does something utilizing the candy. Yeah, I know we had whistle pops way back in the day - but we also had Space Wars too. You can get fairly accurate trends out of consumer response to drastic new ideas applied to common ubiquitous entities - especially as candy is pretty attractive to the target group Nintendo is going after.
You have to remeber this is trend analysis, its not an exact science. You take a whole bunch of statistics with related aspects, qualify them - and then analyze the results in relation to what you're trying to predict. You can do this without having existing statistics on exact subject matter.
Then you'd be wrong, though, as the DS and the PSP have an equivalent install base in the US, for instance. Where the DS is decimating the PSP is in Japan - where the DS effectively tapped a new demographic.
Uhh, no - he's spot on. Even if the PSP and DS have similar install bases, I'd like to see your references - Nintendo has a long history of handheld dominance. That's established. One neck and neck race between two devices while ignoring the GB Advance SP is a flawed analysis. Add those numbers and you see that Nintendo is still owning handheld. The SP is still selling, making it a competator. I guess you meant PSP vs. DS, not true market.
And this is why the Wii will win. SOny and MS are using your philosophy, and targeting the hard core gamers. Nintendo is targeting all gamers. They're looking to get back those people who loved the original Mario, those people who played them back on NES and SNES, and expand the market into the casual gamers. THere's a hell of a lot of gamers out there who couldn't care less about the latest and greatest FPS with uber realistic graphics.
I still have more fans than freaks. WTF is wrong with you people?
I think you both underestimate how price-concious the console market is. If the Wii is half the price of the PS3 and a lot less than a XB360, with just as many good games, then it should be easy to see that the Wii could very well have a very strong advantage.
I'm not making a prediction though, I think it's way to early to do that when two of the systems in question aren't even available. I'm just saying that it's a pretty big wild card, all three companies are placing pretty big bets on the future of the industry, and the one that's right stands to get the most users. MS and Sony are both betting on variations on an HD path, and Nintendo is angling to grow by expanding the market to include more people not considered conventional gamers.
I've seen this argument used a lot to defend Sony, but it's very frequently used against people (like me) who say the PS3 is too expensive, but they will probably buy a Wii. If someone is going to buy a next-gen console, then whether Sony considers them the "intended audience" or not, they are the next-gen audience. The point is that Nintendo has been trying very hard lately to expand their audience to include more than just devoted hard-core gamers, and so far it shows signs of working (I recently bought a DS Lite after not owning a console since the SNES, and I have multiple friends in the same boat -- it's almost the perfect "casual gamer" system [my wife, who almost never plays video games, is now most of the way through New Super Mario Bros.])
So, when all these people who are not in the traditional "next-gen" market say that they will be buying a next-gen system, and that it will not be the PS3, how can you dismiss it with "Well, you aren't the target audience?" Do console sales only count if they're buyers that Sony is interested in?
I am the man with no sig!
PS3 isn't launched. Based on current sales the leading console in 2009 will be the PS2 (which is outselling XBox 360). This may sound like a flip joke, but it's actually a fairly likely scenario. Remember the PSOne? It was only just discontinued.
Let's see, what next-gen platform is PS2 (and PSX) compatible?
Sony is betting the farm on a happy convergence of Blu-ray, compelling PS3 titles, and HDTV critical mass.
Microsoft is betting (but not the farm) on getting in first. Microsoft intends to own your digital hub, and they're prepared to lose a whole pile of money getting there. We've seen them behave similarly with Access (which was used to kill Paradox, et al), Video for Windows / Windows Media Player, Internet Explorer, and so on. There's a huge market at stake, and it's worth billions to kill its current owner. The fact that this is technically illegal is a minor annoyance.
Indeed by making the XBox 360 far more technically distinct from a Windows PC than the XBox (which basically was a PC) Microsoft may be trying to avoid potential antitrust action (it could be argued that XBox was an attempt to leverage its desktop monopoly power, whereas XBox 360 is merely an attempt to buy into a new market by using money made with its desktop monopoly). It seems highly unlikely they did it to make developers happy. (Yay, another bizarro platform with a new API to develop for!)
So far, getting in first hasn't worked very well for Atari, Colecovision, Nintendo, and Sega, so good luck to Microsoft there. It's not clear to what extent the PS2's success was driven by it's serving as a (for the time) inexpensive, high quality DVD-player (we've bought and stopped using three or four DVD players since we bought our PS2, and the PS2 still works -- even if it does ask you to override parental controls for almost every DVD; all but one of the other DVD players has eaten it).
In a sense, the success or failure of the Wii is about as relevant to the Sony/Microsoft battle for control of your "digital lifestyle" as the success or failure of the DS (or PSP), which is to say -- not totally irrelevant, but not central. No sane person is going to store the only copy of their family photographs on a PSP. The reason the Wii is so much more exciting (to gamers) than its competitors is that Nintendo is all about games. Wii will never by our digital hub, and we don't care.
Frankly, I wish someone would figure out that a digital hub ought, basically, to be an application-agnostic, really big, reliable mass storage device, and all the other crap should be peripheral.
Tags are for finding related articles, not for your personal opinion. That's what the comments and your journal are for. If that's not enough, make your own website.
It's a very dark ride.