Slashdot Mirror
Wii, PS3 Sell Big In First Week
Wowzer writes "Nintendo today announced the Wii sold through more than 600,000 units in the Americas in just its first eight days of availability. That's a rate of nearly one per second continuously since the November 19 launch!" From the article: "The company noted that, when taking into account first-party software and accessory sales, Wii sales have thus far amounted to an impressive $190 million. Nintendo also added that sales of the Wii's highly anticipated launch title, The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess, has already has achieved sales of more than 454,000 units in the Americas, a figure which it notes represents in excess of of 75 percent of all hardware purchasers." I couldn't find any sales figures for the PS3, just word that the company has sold all the units it shipped. Gamasutra is also reporting sales figures via Ebay for the two consoles. 15,000 PS3s were sold, while the Wii cracked 27,000 via the popular online auction site.
I'm glad to see Nintendo doing well right off the bat. I hope they pull through and continue to make a good titles, that way one day may kids can enjoy the great games that company has put out to date.
You think thats because all reports point to less than 200,000 actually being shipped when Sony swore they would be shipping twice that many?
"Slashdot, where telling the truth is overrated but lying is insightful."
Really? Wow, thanks for clearing that up for me, Sony. And here I was thinking that half of them had been lost somewhere in stockrooms across the country, and another quarter of them were sitting on store shelves while disinterested gamers walked by. I'm certainly glad we got that cleared up.
As of now, "every system Nintendo or Sony makes is sold immediately!" This obviously won't last, and we'll see who eventually comes out on top...
Nintendo may have hit on an important point though. Just dumping your product on the market with a huge shortage before the Christmas season may not be enough. Nintendo has managed to get major numbers out there (4million estimated before Christmas). If it truly is the hot item, then it stands to stomp the PS3 in terms of market penetration. And if the Wii starts ramping up support, it's quite possible that many who planned on getting a PS3 before, ended up forgetting about it because they're perfectly happy with the Wii - which they could at least obtain.
Ummm ... I saw the stats on another thread and Zonk is dramatically pro-Microsoft and Anti-Sony. On another not, the general media as a whole seem to be anti-Sony after all how unfair is it to point out that Sony has installed a virus on their customer's computers, produced exploding batteries, produced the most expensive videogame system in modern history, used questionable legal practices to put an importer out of buisness, promised a worldwide launch for the PS3 and didn't deliver, and dramatically undersupplied when they did launch the PS3.
Even the ones who dont flat out hate it, pretty much say its not worth it yet, and the benefits of the system simply are not there compared to the 360.
On the otherhand you have a system thats trying to be different. Everyone knows its not as powerful (infact it got some low marks for that) but its FUN and just about everywhere there are storys of adults and kids playing together.
Until sony does something right, I doubt you will ever see pro-ps3 artcles here or anywhere else thats not paid by Sony in advertising. Simply because as of right now Sony has done nothing right, from dust scratching the system, to poor backwards compatability (after ripping on Microsoft for the same) to forcing Blu-ray on a public that from all reports doesnt care about EITHER HD format.
"Slashdot, where telling the truth is overrated but lying is insightful."
How can it 'look' refurbished when it's been out less than two weeks? Given that they opened the box up to do the firmware update before they sent it to you, there are very few pieces of evidence that could identify a refurbished system vs a new one that was plugged in once to install an update.
Sony has done some things over the past couple years to make itself look more evil than Microsoft.
"You spoony bard!" -Tellah
How can you get a refurbished console when they haven't had any to refurbish?
Also, I've had my GameCube serviced, and when I got it back, it looked like it was in pristine condition.
As far as CRC goes...you'd have to be completely retarded to do that. Especially considering that the game downloads are already secured, most likely with a hash. If you're smart enough to know to use a hash to protect game downloads, you probably know to do it for patches too. And considering I haven't heard of anyone downloading a corrupted game, I think the firmware probably encountered a different issue.
That said, there's still a laundry list of changes I'd make to the interface. The biggest one is to make it so that connection attempts can be cancelled. I had to power off my Wii last night after ten minutes or more of trying to connect to the Shop Channel (I turned it on and switched on Futurama, and by the time the episode was over, it hadn't moved).
Wii sold through more than 600,000 units in the Americas in just its first eight days of availability. That's a rate of nearly one per second continuously since the November 19 launch!600000/8 units/day * 1/24 day/hr * 1/60 hr/min * 1/60 min/sec = 0.868 units/sec
If I got 86.8% on an exam, should I go around saying that it's "nearly 100%"?
There's nothing all that radical about Nintendo's approach. Being less expensive means that more people will be able to afford the console. Since they are making a profit off of each unit, if they sell a large volume of them, then great, and if they don't then they are still profitable. This is clearly the more conservative approach, and similar conservatism is also why Nintendo is able to produce higher yields than Microsoft or Sony did at launch, and why the development times and costs for producing platform-specific titles will be lower. What Nintendo has done is realize that the process of squeaking out better graphics is costing more and more at every generation, and simply said "the cost-benefit of continuing down this path is just not that favorable." Instead they went back to an approach they visited with the NES and decided to add novel input devices to a moderate upgrade in performance, and counted on the obvious advantages for studios to not spend 3-5 years and massive budgets per title to sell to a constrained market. This will pay off if Sony continues to have yield problems and apathy over the 360 and PS3 titles persists due to increased development times. If Sony can ramp up production rapidly and cut costs, and all of its third-party developers can flawlessly release the big-name titles then studios will continue to let Sony dictate where their titles go.
Sony took the least conservative approach by designing with IBM and Toshiba a mostly-new processor that will foist heterogeneous code deployment and explicitly parallel vector processing onto the developers, a new (and expensive) storage medium, and of course large and low-yield CPU and GPU dies. Microsoft went slightly more conservative by adopting a homogeneous multiprocessor, but equally diminished yields due to size. Nintendo is just betting that developers and customers are more interested in low-cost entertainment than playing Gears of War or the next MGS. If they and their third-party developers can create games for the masses, this will pay off well. If not then while they will remain profitable in their endeavors they will still trail in volume.
There also haven't been Godzilla attacks (a la Tokyo), but joking aside...
There's the lack of a supply, the broken demo units, the broken global launch promise, the small number of launch titles, their Live-like network mess, the backwards compatability problems, the thefts, the shootings, the riots, the huge ebay prices, the hiring of homeless people to stand in line for scalpers, the arrogant statements by the people in charge of Sony (You'll but it without games, lol), the loss of rumble for "innovative" motion technology that was around at the time of the PS1, the really weird and freaky marketing campaign and finally the rumors that the 400k launch systems were really on the order of 150k.
In contrast the only stated problems with the Wii are as you have listed. One of which can be largely attributed to user error (we don't blame baseballs for broken windows), one of which is rather unprecedented in the history of consoles (I can't think of a console launch where controllers were one of the sold out items) and another of which has had an overwhelming postive resposne from Nintendo (quick replacement for your bricked Wii, not to mention rather isolated incidents).
So while you can probably come up with similar justifications for most of the reasons I listed for the PS3 launch being a mess, the point remains that Sony has easily bested the 360 and the Wii combined with twice as many easily remembered issues with their launch.
I won't even touch listing positive aspects of the launches. I don't think we need to continue this episode of "World's most one sided launch fights".
Thunderclone: ONE MAN ENTERS! TWO MEN LEAVE! ONE MAN ENTERS! TWO MEN LEAVE!
Actually, my guesttimates on their restock situation isn't based on anything I've heard. The sales figure? Sure, I'm just going by what I hear.. but how many more units will be out before christmas?
I know a fair shake of people who were looking at PS3s (for curiousity's sake, nobody I know or talk to even begins to consider the price a reasonable figure), and a number of people who work in retail.. and everyone seems to be of the opinion that if the stores are even able to get in as many units before christmas, as they had for launch, it'll be a miracle.
Basically.
There's 4 weeks till Christmas.
The numbers Sony had for their launch will have to be DUPLICATED.. for every week from now until christmas.. if their launch numbers were correct, and if the guesttimates for 750,000 units by christmas will be correct.
Call me what you will, but I can't say I see any reason to believe that their production suffered so badly for the months leading up to launch that their projected numbers were cut to a TENTH of what they claimed, but that somehow in the past month they've managed to produce as many units as they were able to muscle out the door for their launch.
I mean, honestly, does that many any sense to YOU? That Sony can't make more than maybe 250,000 units for their launch, but somehow production will just magically increase exponentially shortly after launch?
Seriously. Think about it. They'd have to put out as many units per week, from now till christmas, as they put out in the months leading up to launch.. is there any reason to believe all the problems with production have been solved and they've got things cranked up to ludicrous speed now?
... still waiting for this free-as-in-beer free beer I keep hearing about.