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7-9 Million Wiis by 2007?
Gamespot is reporting that Nintendo's production of the Wii is actually going better than expected. Analyst firm UBS is now estimating that 7-9 Million Wii units should be off the production lines by 2007. From the article: "Citing industry 'checks,' UBS analysts Alex Gauna and Steven Chin claim that Nintendo already made 2 million Wiis by the end of September. They go on to predict that, 'at least 7 million and potentially as high as 9 million more units are in the build plan for Q4 06. This production ramp handily exceeds a publicly announced target for 6 million units to ship by year's end.'"
I'll take mine for $200 thank you! :D
There is no -1 Disagree mod. Slashdot.org/faq defines mod options. USE IT.
Now if we could only get 300 million of them, and ship them all to the US, all our base could belong to us!
Any idea on how many games the 7-9 million Wiis will have? Are we looking at only 30 million, or will it break 100 million by the end of 2007?
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
And when the dominant platform is the one at $200 developers will develop for it to sell more units.
And then the prices will go down, the platforms will be unified (Or at least logically diversified [high end low end mid range etc]) and all will be good with the force!
I know four people here who are going to buy a Wii. Assuming that everyone else in the UK knows 4 people who are going to buy a Wii that makes 240 million sales in the first week alone just for the UK via simple mathematical extrapolation. Can't argue with the numbers!
Think of the Children; Sleep with your Sister
Everything is going so well for Nintendo. I really hope for them that the launch dates go off without a hitch and the awesome reviews start pouring in a few days later. It would be a make a huge impact in the definition of what "next-gen" games are if this console is a massive success.
Hopefully nothing has gone wrong in the production process. I can't imagine the stress of being a designer or tester for the console hardware. What happens when your company is successfully rolling millions of new machines off the line and someone finds a showstopper hardware bug? We all rememeber the Intel division fiasco.
And when the dominant platform is the one at $200 developers will develop for it to sell more units.
Especially when the dev platform is only $1000 for the Wii, instead of ten times as much for the PS3 or 360 ones.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
If 9 million people Wii, then most homes will be flooded by the 'yellow river'.
but I dunno, Sony says everyone wants to pay $9 million for a video game console. It does have Blu-Ray, after all... and we know how great the market for Blu-Ray will be. I'm guessing it might even rival the UMD market.
With that many units on the shelf they have more then cover the holiday buyig system, and enough left on the shelves for the post holiday market. Lines up very nicely with a price drop in the late spring summer time frame. Its almost creepy how everything Sony has gotten wrong (supply, timing, innovation, buzz) Nintendo has gotten dead on right this time around.
the problem with manufacturing so many units so soon is the possibility of problems turning up. Like the 360's overheating or sony's batteries exploding. Although Nintendo has a very good track record for QA, what's to say that some new problem won't crop up? Are they that confident?
That'd be a scary thing if there's some kind of fire hazard with the units and the big N has 6 million units in warehouses across the world.
...spike
Ewwwwww, coconut...
It seems they went in and produced HD capable consoles one generation too early, the increase in price seems to be giving Nintendo a big boost come launch time. I only hope the actual launch lives up to the speculation.
Nintendo won't have to live up to the graphic expectations of Sony, Xbox, but for that, the gameplay will have higher expectations.
This is of course good for the average consumer, because, by the merits of mass production, HD capable consoles will be the minimum/default the next generation, and it might even boost HD TV sales more than they are, and drive down the price in that area by the time the next console wars come.
Not to get prophetic on dat ass, but code name "revolution" is starting to make a little more sense, with the way wii may affect the industry.
Similes are like metaphors
I don't know any people. Assuming everybody else doesn't know any people either, this implies no people eixst and Nintendo will not be able to sell ANY Wiis, due to a lack of potential customers.
Wii will wiialize millions of wii! Wiially wii will!
Of course, that's the wrong preposition:
All our base are belong to Wii
With that many units on the shelf they have more then cover the holiday buyig system, and enough left on the shelves for the post holiday market.
Perfect for all those moms and dads returning their kids' overheating PS3's.
first generation gameboys were nigh-unplayable due to shitty backlighting.
Did you own a 1G GameBoy? There was no backlight at all! Even the first color GameBoys didn't have backlights. Backlights in GameBoys are a pretty recent development. But they were able to survive a long time without them, since all of the other portables with backlights and/or color were pretty much total flops (Sega GameGear, Atari Lynx, etc.).
7-9 million Wiis?
Thats just pissing in the ocean...
In the free world the media isn't government run; the government is media run.
Yeah, that's another thing that many people haven't been thinking of. By not investing as much now in R&D to get the best graphics, Nintendo can afford to obtain the high def technology for a cheaper price, and will be able to affordably release another new system is less time.
The PS3 is going to have to be around forever, just to turn a profit and make an improved platform feasible.
...in 2027 we'll be able to get them for a quarter just like we can get super mario brothers for NES today.
Nintendo's physcal Q4 ends June 30th, not Dec 31st...
hi
Unfortunately, no one can be told what my sig is...
I think you have jumped the gun too early by making conclusions about consoles that have yet to be released. Besides, by the end of their life cycles, HD will be more common. How common, who knows? But it will give the consoles more lasting power.
The funny thing is...the only thing the Wii has going for it is it's controller (and first party games, of course). If the other consoles make a similar controller that works well...the Wii advantage is gone (Wiirased?). I am sure they have some good patents on that thing though. But it isn't hard to add a new controller after the fact...it is impossible to scale a console's power upward after it is released (mainly due to compatability reasons for older games).
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Actually, it is hard. I know of only one case where it worked: The Dual Shock on the original PS. And that one only worked because the new controller was a superset of the old one (it added the analog sticks) and because it came very early in the PS's life.
You can't just go ahead and replace the pack-in controller with something totally different. How would people play the old games with the new controller? You'd essentially fragment your customers. It would be like having two entirely different consoles. The only alternative is selling the new controller as a standalone item. That doesn't work either, because you won't sell a ton until there are lots of good games for the controller, and there won't be lots of good games for the controller unless you sell a ton. Look at the Cube Bongos, at the PS2 camera... Hell, look at the Power Glove.
How do you propose Sony would go about introducing a Wiimote clone for the PS3?
By the end of the coming console cycle, the graphics will look dated, HD or not. I've experienced this many times with PC games: my setup isn't powerful enough to make it super pretty until the game is old enough to not look super pretty anyway. The people who will get the HD benefit this time around will be those who already have an HD set. So basically, not that many.
You forget about a few things: The price, and the target market.
The price matters... well, for obvious reasons -- especially for casual gamers.
The target market matters because it means that I, as a casual-/non-gamer, will probably be able to find plenty of software which provides fun diversions without eating up much time at a chunk or requiring any kind of dedication. (There are others in my household who spend more time gaming, and they may well buy more conventional games [as they do spend money on DVDs] after the hardware has become available -- but they don't make the kind of lump purchases involved in buying a new console, and so mostly are playing their games on decade-old console hardware or 5-year-old PC hardware).
(Also, as others have pointed out, changing out the controller after the fact isn't so easy. Everyone who develops for the Wii will support the Wiimote, and games will typically be initially designed with the Wiimote first in mind rather than as an afterthought; any fancier after-the-fact controller would be supported only by a subset of games, and even that not as well).
the wii is just a slightly higher clocked gamecube with a minimal ram and memory card upgrade plus new gimmick controller. thats why they can churn them out at such high volume, its old and simple tech theyre already familiar with. theres no way im paying $250 for this thing, and the only thing revolutionary about the controller is the ridiculous $60 price tag it carries. the games cost $50 too, which is just stupid. This thing should cost $150 max, the controllers $15 max and the games $15 max. then we would see a revolution available to the masses. what a scam. nintendo is very clever and will be laughing all the way to bank yet again, only this time with gullible people kissing its backside
A realated point is that HD makes the 360 and PS3 effectively even more expensive. I wouldn't buy either of those without also getting a HD TV - who'd get a brand new console, spend that amount of money and then know that you're nto seeing the games at their best?
With Wii standard def is all it can do so it doesn't matter if I don't have a hi-def TV. So 360 costs me 360+HD and PS3 costs me PS3 + HD but Wii costs me only Wii.
Another way of putting that is I don't mind playing Wii in SD cos that's all it can do, but I won't play either of the others in SD cos I'd be 'missing out'.
Not entirel logical, but it's the way I feel.
MS & Sony can't realistically add new controllers after the fact, but Nintendo can certainly release an HD-edition of the Wii down the road. The SD and HD edition can be 100% compatible (PC games support multiple resolutions and detail levels all the time). SD-era games won't look as good on an HD unit--but games always start to look dated after time.
As several people have pointed out, Nintendo has had several design problems in the past. The biggest examples are with the lack-of-backlight original GBA portables, and the bulky original DS unit (with a stupidly positioned power button). That said, they were all completely playable (I had both handhelds), but when the redesigned units came out, they were much superior to the original.
:)
A cynic could argue that even the design problems were "by design", as its a great way to get gamers to buy more hardware in the end.
I haven't had any quality issues with the hardware itself though. In fact, while many people were lamenting about dead pixel problems with first batch of PSPs, there wasn't a similar issue with the DS, AFAIK.
-- jchenx