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January Game Sales Explode, Wii Dominates
njkid1, as he does from time to time, passed us a link to a story on the GameDaily site. Today they're discussing the January NPD numbers for the games industry. In short, they're terrific. Software sales totaled $549 million for the month, up a staggering 53 percent over last year. Hardware sales were brisk as well, with the Wii selling around 436,000 units. Trailing behind were Microsoft and Sony, with 360 hitting 294,000 units sold and the PS3 selling 244,000 units. January had an extra week, which resulted in 'inflated' sales, but even after normalizing the data things were tremendous for the games industry in a month where there's normally a post-holiday slump.
Sales wise, Sony has a problem. They've sold fewer units than either of their competitors and they're selling them at a slower rate, which means that gulf will only increase. If this continues, more and more franchises that were exclusive to Sony will move to become multi platform. Assassin's Creed, GTA, and VF have already done so. The PS3 may be a great system with great games, but from a sales perspective their situation is dire.
If Nintendo keeps numbers like this up though, the PS3/360 debate becomes moot. They would be the undisputed sales leader by the middle of next year. Even the PS2 rarely broke 400,000 units during a non-holiday-season month. And who knows what they Wii sales figures would be if they could keep up with demand.
This in itself is good story. Keep in mind that Sony PS3's and Microsoft Xbox 360's are widely available and on stores shelves everywhere, while the Wii's are still in short supply. In spite of that, the Wii is still outselling both. If you're Microsoft, you can always claim that it's because the 360 has been out for a year, and it's total sales are (of course) much higher at this point.
But if you're Sony, that's just got to hurt.
/still wants a Wii...
I picked up Madden over Christmas, and I was quite impressed; in fact it's the first Madden that's impressed me since the 16 bit era (I always liked the NFL 2K/ESPN sports more). I wish more sports titles come out and are able to execute as well. I'm definitely interested in a dedicated tennis/golf game, and I'm a bit concerned that I haven't heard of any coming out. I hope it's not due to the lack of accuracy of the wiimote. The Wii has a ton of potential, I just hope the Wii lives up to it.
Sadly, PS/2 was yet another victim of USB, which doesn't care what you plug into it, the electrical slut.
Are you seriously trying to spin the fact that Sony has fewer units on the market than both the Wii and the 360 and is selling them at a slower pace as a good thing? Are you really lumping in PS2 units with PS3 units to inflate the numbers? Are you actually stating that Naughty Dog's game, the one that has only one screenshot available and no name, is "insane" and "people are going nuts over right now"? I call shill
If Nintendo's ahead by the middle of next year, they're going to stay there. Console sales are a matter of momentum. Selling a lot of consoles attracts developers, which make the console more attractive to customers, which sells more consoles. While it's certainly possible for one to come from far behind and take the lead with some killer app that appears long after launch, I can't remember any instances of that happening.
Ita erat quando hic adveni.
It might be to early to predict the exact outcome, but the positioning in this first year is crucial for all companies involved. If Sony can't reach a critical mass with the PS3 fast enough, then developers will stop making exclusive games since they can't make a profit without a large enough install base. As I've stated we've already seen this with VF and GTA. Without exclusive games, the incentive to buy a PS3 diminishes and their sales lag even further behind the competitors. As sales lag more, even more exclusives flee the console to recoup their investments on other systems. It's circular. It's exponentially more difficult to reclaim ground you've lost than it is to keep ground you've already made. At this point, I don't think Sony's fate is written in stone. The margins are still narrow enough that they could come out on top. However, it's going to require a significant price drop or a plethora of excellent exclusive games to regain the ground that they have already lost, neither of which is on the horizon any time soon.
Something that a lot of Sony fans miss is that publishers hold the purse strings (and determine what games get made) and the only performance they care about is sales performance. Certainly, the outcome can not be determined after 3 months but (unless something changes soon) things will snowball out of controll and the PS3 will be in serious trouble.
The fact is that (if the Wii continues to sell like it has been) the Wii will be the best selling platform in the World by Christmas 2007, and probably will be the best selling platform in every region by Christmas 2008; if this happens every publisher who has worldwide interests (think every major publisher) will focus on the Wii by Christmas 2007, and every publisher will be focusing on the Wii by Christmas 2008.
Are you basing the 4:1 ratio on some total number? Because based on the NDP numbers its a bit less than 2:1. Of course, doing an assessment based on total sales isn't exactly fair at this point, since PS3 has yet to launch in Europe.
It's a bit too early to call the game altogether. We're talking millions and tens of millions in an industry where the biggest player last round sold over 100 million consoles. We'll start seeing real indications when more exclusive games start comming around.
> There has to be a bunch of gloating Sony execs at their headquarters right now.
For now.
You don't know any PS3 game devs, do you. I don't know any that are praising the system. Gee, wouldn't want it _easier_ for the devs now, would we!
Sony has really alienated its PS2 game devs -- that the guys you want to IMPRESS, not dissuade from the hardware. As much as I love developing for the PS2, one really has to wonder what the crack the Sony Engineers were smoking.
Who says there can only be one winner?
I think the Wii is something entirely different and if done correctly Sony could still retain their core gamer generation market who like fast action zillions of polygons and l337 skills whilst Nintendo will exist happily with their more family oriented gaming set.
Its capturing an entire class of gamers which just wouldn't even have purchased a console before, its a similar story with the DS - you have people playing on these things that wouldn't even consider another game system.
I cannot ever imagine my parents owning any playstation or xbox, but I think Nintendo might just have themselves another sale based upon their reaction to our Wii when they played last night.
liqbase
People make this comparison a lot, and I don't think it applies. The 360 had pretty bad launch, but they didn't have to have a good launch. They launched in a vacuum with a whole year to get their crap together. They didn't have to worry about exclusives fleeing to other consoles or pressure to drop the price. They were the only game in town. That's why they did it so soon.
The PS3 is in an entirely different environment. It doesn't matter if it's selling better than the 360 did at launch. It's not competing against the 360 one year ago. It's competing against the 360 (and the Wii) now. It has to sell better than the 360 is selling now, not last year. If two people are racing, and one is given a head start, it doesn't make much sense for the second person to say, "well I'm running faster than he was when he started out". It might be a nice consolation, but he's still going to lose the race. The PS3 has a lot of ground to make up and they're not doing it. In fact they're losing ground.
Sony is in a bad position. They need to make some corrections to their plan. A price drop is the most obvious, but a good library would help too. It can't just be a good library though. It has to be a better library than the 360's, and they have to remember that that's a moving target. The Titanic is sinking and Sony's on deck playing classical music. All this spinning the numbers and looking at things through rose colored glasses isn't helping. It's just keeping people from seeing the problems.
That's exactly it for me.
I want a game that's fun. I don't really care about how it looks. If there's a great storyline with a reasonable interface, that's fun.
It's got to be a "droppable" game, too. I don't want to have to run around for another 30-60 minutes trying to find a save point. That stops being fun pretty damned fast. It's one of the reasons I've cut down on playing video games and moved to mostly playing board games.
My wife and I are getting a Wii next December, once all the plebeians have found the bugs. Sure, it doesn't have the HD power of the PS3. Who cares? Nintendo decided to stop chasing the eye-candy tech and go back to the core of games.
Games should be fun.
If you want pretty, then watch a movie. Oh, wait. You are, since the ads and the box art are usually stills or pre-rendered video that looks nothing like the actual game.
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