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.'"

Comments

Supply and demand?

[Endo13]

I'll take mine for $200 thank you! :D

Tis a Wii too many, but lots of fun

[WillAffleckUW]

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?

Might not be enough

[also-rr]

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!

Re:Might not be enough

[246o1]

I know between 5 and 10 people who are going to buy a Wii. Assuming all other people also know 5-10 people who are going to buy a Wii, that's 30 to 60 billion sales in the first week alone!

Re:Might not be enough

[CastrTroy]

I think that they must be factoring in this. The Wii is supposed to be geared toward those who don't usually buy games, of course, while still satisfying the needs of the people who do game.

Re:Might not be enough

[rolfwind]

I think it does say something that geeks are anticipating the Wii. It was MS/Sony's expectation that us geeks, being more hardcore, would welcome the PS3 or perhaps the Xbox with welcome arms due to the horsepower alone.

And then we would spread the gospel to the Muggles in turn, providing free advertising/sale's drive to their consoles.

I know enough people still anticipate those systems, but it seems the Xbox 360 reception has been lukewarm and the Wii has turn the industry on it's head by not trying to compete in the areas Sony is exceedingly strong in, but rather playing to their own strengths.

In part, I see the PS3, with its Bluray encumbered/enable device, heading somewhat in the same direction as the Nintendo Gameboy VR and Sega Saturn, of years past. It will have success, however, but right now it seems Sony has to initiate most of its own hype, the PS3 will fail to launch Blu-ray as a defacto video standard, and probably fall short of the PS2 in terms of market domination.

Re:Might not be enough

[kthejoker]

An Imagined Conversation Inside Your Head

The Guy Who Makes You Funny: Man, did you read that?
The Guy Who Does Your Math: Yes, what terrible logic!
Funny: Logic? Well, of course it's not logical, it's a j-
Math: Shh! I am working out how to explain the logical flaw of "social networking" to this yokel.
Funny: What? You're going to "explain" it. Dude, he knows it's a joke. That's the whole point of jokes, people do them on purpose.
Math: Preposterous. He's not joking, he's clearly an imbecile who thinks that people's networks are exponential in nature, when really they're not.
Funny: Wait, wait. I get it. You're joking with me.
Math (having just hit submit): Yes. A joke.
Funny (chuckling): Whew! You had me going there, I thought - you know - maybe you were really going to try to prove a point, and we just don't need to show we're unfun-HOLY SHIT YOU ACTUALLY SUBMITTED A POST HOW COULD YOU?

(Pause.)

Funny: We are *never* going to get laid.

Re:Might not be enough

[cowscows]

I was thinking about this last night. I remember a little bit of Atari gaming, but the bulk of what I clearly remember in my gaming career started with the NES. Since then, the industry has grown by leaps and bounds, the power of the hardware has increased at a stunning rate, and game development prices have continued to balloon.

But through all that, I still only seem to see about four or five must-have games in a given year. Despite all the advances in technology, making a great game appears to still be rather difficult. Maybe the technology has made it harder. I don't make games, so I'm not sure.

I'm certainly glad that graphics have improved. I'm excited to see what sorts of changes more realistic physics will allow in games. If AI gets better, that's awesome too. But don't think that it'll necessarily mean that the quality of games will improve overall.

I don't believe that there's a whole bunch of designers out there with these absolutely killer ideas for games, just waiting for the hardware to get powerful enough to make it reality. I still think that tetris is the best game I ever played, and it could run on a calculator that I had 10 years ago. Horsepower will only get you so far. You've got to have some inspired and dedicated designers making games, and as long as that's there, what you run it on doesn't matter so much.

There's no reason why a $250 system can't have games that are just as good as a $600 system, no matter how many pixels each one can render.

Re:Might not be enough

[cowscows]

Yeah, I thought about that, but I'm not sure that's entirely it. There are still plenty of older games that I still find fun. The bulk of my time on my DS is spent on Advance Wars, which is so simple that it could probably run on an NES no problem (with mildly downgraded artwork and sound.

Online multiplayer, however, I'll give you. That's a recent advance that's really benefitted as of late from technology, and has made some new types of games possible.

All that being said, I think my original point still stands. There have been many hyped up games, with beautiful visuals and such, which have ended up being not particularly fun. Packing more hardware into a box does not guarantee better games.

Re:Might not be enough

[Heir Of The Mess]

I know between 5 and 10 people who are going to buy a Wii. Assuming all other people also know 5-10 people who are going to buy a Wii, that's 30 to 60 billion sales in the first week alone!

Who let these RIAA/MPAA mathematicians in here? This is a gaming forum goddamit! Oh wait..Is that you Sony?

Going so well

[nlawalker]

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.

Re:And we're going to buy them, and make games

[WillAffleckUW]

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.

Smart move

[jacks smirking reven]

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.

Re:Smart move

[Kemanorel]

Interesting parallel you just brought to mind for me... NES, SNES, N64. Third console for Nintendo, the beginning of their decline in dominance. PS1, PS2, PS3. Third console, underwhelming response from potential customers, possible (probable?) decline in dominance. Is this the console equivalent of the sophomore curse that many bands run into?

I think Sony & MS have jumped the gun too earl

[rolfwind]

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.

Re:what if problems arise?

[SoapDish]

I have no worries about this. I (or my brothers) have bought every nintendo system the day it came out since the SNES, and we've never had a problem, ever. I've had many, amany problems with my first of the run PS2, though.

Also, with the early production, maybe nintendo will test those first units to make sure the mass-manufacturing works well.

Re:what if problems arise?

[Wdomburg]

I expect heat won't be an issue since they're specifically designing for low power consumption.

For the most part, I don't forsee too many issues. The chips are derivitives of a proven design manufactured using mature technology at a quality fab plant (IBM's fishkill facility). Most of the other components are off the shelf - Broadcom ethernet and bluetooth chips, MoSys SRAM, etc.

Nintendo is doomed.

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

all our base could belong to us?

[norminator]

Of course, that's the wrong preposition:

All our base are belong to Wii

The post holiday market:

[norminator]

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.

Actually, it is hard.

[LKM]

But it isn't hard to add a new controller after the fact

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?

Re:Actually, it is hard.

[Leviance]

Its wishful thinking on his part. He's just a PS fanboy who hates to see another company win. The ideal solution for all gamers would be for the Wii to be successful, forcing M$ and S to either copy them (most likely) or better yet, come up with some innovations of their own. By all means I hope Sony does well, but it seems they have s___ed the pooch on this one.