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Wii Outsells PS3, Blue-ray Outsells HD DVD
njkid1, a regular contributor of GameDaily articles, passed us word that the Wii is handily outselling the PS3 in Japan. Famitsu parent company Enterbrain has figures showing that Nintendo sold 405,000 Wii units last month, while Sony sold 148,000 units of the PS3. While this is probably not something the folks at Sony are overjoyed about, they did have reason to crow this week. They've now announced that cumulative Blu-ray sales have passed the HD DVD format for the first time. Gamasutra has the word, from Sony itself, with some interesting supporting information. Most PS3 owners, it seems, have used their system to watch HD movies. Some full 80 percent plan to buy further HD titles in the future. This is further support for the VideoScan sales figures we discussed last week.
Given that there are no games to play on the PS3, it makes complete sense that people would be watching movies on it instead. There really has been nothing to push HD-DVD that much so I'm not surprised that Blu-Ray is winning in terms of sales. However, that may change as soon as less-expensive players are released that have more functionality, etc.
In any case, those sales numbers are probably too small right now to bring them any significant returns. I'd wait a year or two before considering whether Sony made a mistake with Blu-Ray or not.
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Obviously Blu-Ray has started to sell well after 1,000,000+ Blu-Ray enabled PS3 units ... The question I have is if Blu-Ray will continue to sell well over the next few months ...
I really don't know, but I suspect that a lot of people who bought a PS3 to play games might have bought 1 or 2 Blu-Ray movies simply because they wanted to try the drive out; being that there are few places that currently rent Blu-Ray/HD-DVD movies buying them is the only option for a lot of people. In contrast, I suspect that anyone who has bought any HD-DVD player is likely a movie collector and will buy 1-2 movies every week (or two) for the next couple of years. The question is how big of an impact 1 PS3 will make towards sales as compared to one stand alone HD-DVD player.
While they are both game consoles, there is a big price differential between a Wii and a PS3. It makes sense that the Wii would sell more units. While it has a nifty controller, power wise it's on par with the PS2 which sold like gangbusters this past holiday season. Compare it to those numbers for a telling look.
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Just like DVD, most people's first DVD player was a PS2.
Where on earth did you come up with THAT? The PS2 was a good-selling console, but it didn't sell THAT well. According to the SanJose Mercury News, lifetime sales for the PS2 in the U.S., as of the end of 2006, was 37.1 million. According to Nielsen, DVD currently has 80% market penetration, and there are approx. 113M U.S. households. (according to the Census), meaning that 90.4M U.S. households have a DVD player. An unknown number of those may have purchased a PS2 AFTER they bought a DVD player. (That was the case in my house.)
Maybe for the households that bought a PS2, it is possible (but not certain) that "most" of them had it as their first player, but that does not translate to the U.S. market overall.
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The common perception about the VideoScan numbers is that a lot of PS3 owners used their "free Blu-ray movie" coupon, boosting 'sales' after Christmas. Especially since there doesn't seem to be anything else available worth doing on the PS3 device right now. This is in addition to a rather dry HD-DVD lineup in January. Let's remember, the first two weeks in January after Christmas doesn't necessarily set a trend.
The VideoScan numbers for the third week in January, not reported in the article, already show Blu-Ray slumping down again, compared to HD-DVD.
All this sounds vaguely similar to the narrowly-defined "Zune leads 30GB music player market in first two days of sales" reports we saw a few weeks ago. Much ado about nothing.
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"analysts still anticipated the Wii would only sell (slightly) more than the Gamecube did and the PS3 would control 75% of the market"
That's because analysts have demonstrated an ability to be wrong so often that it cannot be explained by probability alone, and must therefore be due to some sort of supernatural power that they posses.
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The "PS3" game on the other hand is the opposite. For those who could afford triple the game price, the first few levels were EXTREMELY hard. Then it got incredibly easy, but by those levels people realized the gameplay was crap and stopped playing altogether.