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How Wii Is Creaming the Competition
CNN has a report on the Wii's success in the games marketplace right now, referring to their sales dominance as 'creaming the competition'. The article tries to break down exactly why Nintendo's console has sold so successfully, discussing the system's marketing, engineering, and philosophy. "Next, engineers settled on a new approach for the Wii's looks. Just as the DS shunned the Game Boy name to appeal to a broader audience, the Wii would adopt a sleek white exterior instead of the toylike loud colors used on the GameCube. Even CEO Iwata got involved in the design process; at one point he handed engineers a stack of DVD jewel cases and told them the console should not be much bigger. Why so small? To work with the motion-sensitive wireless controller Nintendo planned, Iwata reasoned, the console would have to sit directly beside the TV. Make it any larger and customers would hesitate to leave it there. " Their sales strategy is working in spades. CVG reports that at least one analyst thinks that Wii demand won't be met until 2009. This past weekend Chris Kohler had an interesting comment on the 'ambassador programs' Nintendo ran in advance of the Wii's launch, and how that might tie in to the system's financial success.
I'd have to say it's quite obvious. Nintendo is creaming the competition by selling more units then them...
The Wii also has the advantage of being hit with supply problems. Nothing makes the average consumer want something more than knowing they can't have it. It's affordable, has some pretty good games out there at release, and is in short supply. It's a trifecta!
"It is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education." -Albert Einstein
Personally, I own both a 360 and a Wii, and while I've had tremendous fun with my Wii - especially over the holidays - I've recently found myself playing my 360 again. The lack of integrated multiplayer as well as the poor selection for Wii titles is making me start to regret my purchase, which is the last thing I want to do. Really, I've enjoy the Wii a lot so far, and I'm excited to see what developers will do to utilize this unique system, but if they don't start coming out with titles that aren't lousy ports from the other systems, I may find myself selling the poor thing. I could probably get double what I paid for it, too.
Blerg.
Their sales strategy is working in spades. At least one analyst thinks that Wii demand won't be met until 2009.
And that analyst should be fired. I think it is much more likely that the Wii will be able to catch up to demand in 3 to 4 months. Right now there are 1000s of Wii consoles up on Ebay. So I feel some of the demand is a bit artificial due to people trying to make a quick buck.
What I find interesting is that the PS2 is outselling the Wii (of course, we don't know if the Wii would outsell the PS2 if it could increase its supply enough..it probably would). I mean, it makes sense because it has the largest library and still has great games coming out for it...but still...I don't remember this happening in the previous previous generation.
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The Wii is not a threat to the 360 because the only market segment that overlaps between the two is also the market segment that would not think twice at buying both. Nintendo and Microsoft strategically position their products to harm Sony, which tries to have (almost) as broad an appeal as the Wii and fails largely because of the price point, and tries to be as hardcore as the 360 and fails largely because of the lack of games. Both companies working together strengthens both their positions and damages their mutual competitor.
Rex is 09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0
This reminds me of how Palm succeeded where Newton failed. I liked the Newton, but Newton design was driven by a futuristic vision. Palm design was built around simple practical aspects of the user's experience, such as the utility of carrying the device around in a shirt pocket comfortably.
You'd think human centered product design would be a no-brainer, but clearly its harder to do than it sounds. It isn't just getting the details right, its being bold in choosing not to do things. Making shrewd decisions not to do things conventionally thought necesssary characterize the breakthrough designs of the Wii and Palm.
I think the reason that we see so few excellent product designs is that its hard to let go of preconceptions. So much of business runs on swagger.
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Repeat after me: "I, state your name, am NOT in Nintendo's target demographic."
You are most likely male, between the ages of 18 and 25. You are not who Nintendo wants to sell these things to. They want to sell to adults, with careers and families, who want to pick up a game to play for 20 minutes -- not hard core gamers. They want to sell to thirtysomethings (like me) who played NES, SNES, Genesis, Turbografix, etc. back in the day, and want to share the games they used to play with their children.
They want people who can pick up a game and have fun for the short amount of free time they have. It's hard to do that with an Xbox or PS* -- it's not fun getting pwned by some 12 year old with nothing better to do with his time than play Halo for 40 hours a week.
It shocks the hell out of me that they were the first ones to realize this market even exists.
... the rule that says all games have to be big budget extravaganzas which fail if they're not mega-blockbusters. Take a look at Wii Sports, Hazimete no Wii (sorry, don't know what the English version was called), or even the Wario game. These are not games with $20 million development budgets which have to sell hundreds of thousands of copies just to break even. Thus, they don't have to get bought by EVERYONE who owns the console -- even a slice of a slice of the gaming pie works for them. And if you look at the games-per-Wii attach rate rather than the sales-per-megahit rate, Wii is kicking some serious booty (probably has something to do with the fact that Wii + half dozen games is still cheaper than some of the other options). If there are five fun party games and everybody buys one to three, then each game individually sells a heck of a lot less than a system-making killer app like FFVII or Halo, but Nintendo still laughs their way to the bank.
Help poke pirates in the eyepatch, arr.
Nope. You can either do that or you can attract other customers and expand the market. It doesn't matter if the competition is getting the same absolute number of customers they would have anyway, as long as they're still getting relatively much fewer customers than you.
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
"It shocks the hell out of me that they were the first ones to realize this market even exists."
Actually, I think Microsoft figured it out with solitare and networked checkers, but they just didnt' figure out how to make money at it.
So you compare the MSRP, the price at retail, to a scalper's price. Now that's solid evidence. Try comparing apples to apples. 400 to 250, 62.5% of the price, or half the price of the PS3.
jX [ Make everything as simple as possible, but no simpler. - Einstein ]
The first to really profit from it was EA games with The Sims. It really tapped into an unexplored market and it paid off big time.
Speaking as a male, aged 32, with a career and a wife, I can say that I play my 360 MUCH more than the Wii. I still don't play a lot, as you rightly point out time doesn't allow it, but I'd rather play 20-30 mins of Crackdown or a few races of PGR3 than any of the Wii games I have so far. My wife likes the Wii, but that's because she's a Mario fan so she's currently hooked on Super Paper Mario. But I don't think she's even played any of the other games apart from Wii Sports which kept her interested for maybe 30 mins total.
We also play casual games on both platforms, but we both prefer the new games (like Boom Boom Rocket, Cloning Clyde, Zuma, etc) on XBLA much more than the old stuff on VC. I think if Nintendo opened the VC up to non-retro titles (maybe even homebrew as MS are planning to do with XNA) it could be pretty cool. Don't get me wrong, I loved paperboy as a kid, but it doesn't really do anything for me anymore.
So big up to Nintendo for selling all these boxes, I wish them well, but once SPM is done (few days now I'd guess) mine will be back gathering dust.
---- Den ene knappen er powerknapp, den andre er Bender voice knapp "Bite My Shiny Metal Ass"
Actually it is a somewhat valid arguement.
The Wii IS selling at those prices.
PS3's are not selling at a loss.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
Every time the Wii is discussed, someone cracks a joke about "playing with his Wii", and there's much giggling. Combined with the hand gestures that arise from the new controllers, it's all one big phallic joke. And now it's "creaming" the competition. Lol. That's why.
The "cue the foo posts in 3, 2, 1..." posts will commence with no subsequent foo posts in 3, 2, 1...
Which has me baffled. The 360 is much LESS 'casual player' friendly than the Wii, Yet XBLA has much more Casual friendly titles than the VC. I have a Wii60 myself, and While the 360 has networked Hearts, Uno, Poker... Even Pac Man!... come on Nintendo where is the Sudoku game, or Dr. Mario, or Poker, or a 'Crossword Puzzle game' something, anything even universal staples like pacman / frogger would be great.
Personally, I love the classics on the VC, and I'm one of the few people I know who thinks they are fairly priced (IF you don't think Zelda: lttp, Donkey Kong Country or Gunstar heroes are worth $8 each you're crazy.), but what about say, my retired parents?
Nintendo has tapped a broader demographic of casual gamers, but what can they buy? Most of the games out now (at retail, and VC) are still catering to the hardcore...
Actually it would be 'Less than half' the price of a PS3. Since Sony discontinued the 20 gig model, the Wii is now ~42% of the PS3's price (and it comes with a game).
The success of the Wii isn't some esoteric nonsense. It's very simple: Nintendo built something that people actually want. Instead of listening to the very small demographic of the hardcore gamers and hardcore developers whose world revolves around frames per second, polygon count, pixel shaders and rendering pipelines, they asked themselves (and probably lots of other people) what Joe and Jane want in a gaming console.
So what do Joe and Jane want? Fun, something to play together and with friends, something that's easy. Gameplay first, killer graphics second.
And the thing is: Most of what Joe and Jane want also appears to Harald Hardcore. A fun game simply is a fun game, and even if you could code better graphics yourself on your overclocked PC, it still is a fun game.
And that's the hard part: Coding is the easy part of game design. Making a good game is the hard part. Always has been. Maybe that's why so many PC and Xbox and PS3 titles try to sell on their graphics alone.
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I have figured out the secret to the success of the Wii. Women like it. People have been talking about the elusive "woman gamer" for some time. Nintendo finally found them. Last weekend some guys from my office went to a party that featured a Wii. They played various Wii games with a group of woman until past midnight. One guy even scored. That would not have happened with an Xbox 360 party.
Sorry, the Wii invented its market and it is completely separate from that shared by the next-gen consoles. The Wii's market is the cheap family - especially any parent who thinks the Wii is going to be an exercise machine. Sony and Microsoft's strategies have very, very little focus on families.
Saying the Wii is blowing away the "competition" is sort of like suggesting that the Honda Accord is dominating Corvette and Porsche.
Interesting:
The PS3 is selling for about $500 each, and has sold 3.16 million units worldwide (according to vgcharts) making back roughly 1.58 billion dollars.
The Wii is selling for about $250 each, and has sold 6.54 million units worldwide (according to vgcharts) making back roughly 1.635 billion dollars.
The 360 is selling for about $400 each, and has sold 9.68 million units worldwide (according to vgcharts) making back roughly 3.872 billion dollars.
Looks like X-Box 360 is creaming the competition currently, in both money recouped in hardware sales (at a lost), and units sold.
Meet new people, and kill them.
I can't believe I'm replying to this, but that's exactly what he was saying... you see, he turned the tense and the subject around. Instead of saying the Wii is creaming its competition, he said the PS3 is getting creamed by its own competition. His point was that the PS3 is getting creamed by XBox/Wii more than Wii is creaming XBox/PS3.
At least, that's how I read it.
Where do you live, and what do you charge for shipping???
As a rule, I never trust dark brown ketchup.
It's even more interesting when you factor time in
The 360 has been on sale for 18 months
The PS3 and Wii have been on sale for 6 months
The Wii has sold about twice as much as the PS3 in about the same amount of time
The Wii has sold about 2/3 as much as the 360 in about 1/3 of the time.
If nothing dramatic changes the Wii will be the best selling next-gen console by the end of the summer. Of course Halo 3 and GTA 4 could very well kick start the HD console sales in the fall. Either way, Xmas 2007 is when the first real battle of this generation will take place.
"I've sunk a whole bunch of time -- many, many hours -- into Wii Sports. Bowling especially!"
What he said. I'm still playing Wii Sports to this day, usually 4 or 5 times a week. My bowling skill score keeps fluctuating around 980-1050, and I'm still working how to bowl strikes more consistently to raise it. Anyone who says Wii Sports gets dull after 20 minutes is talking out of their posterior.
And another fun long-playing Wii game that gets overlooked is Excite Truck. It takes a damn long time to S-rank all of the tracks in Mirror Mode (and unlock the final unlockable). Too many folks, however, simply win a few races and mistakenly assume they can "beat" the game in a few hours...
--R.J.
Electric-Escape.net
Case in point: I was at my parents house having dinner when my 57 year old mom said "I really like those Nintendo Wiis. I think I'll buy one." My jaw about hit the floor. Here's someone who has never played a video game for more than five minutes in her life talking about dropping $250 on a console. I asked her why she liked it, and she said that it wasn't just sitting in front of a screen, that it would help her stay active. She's worried about osteoporosis and gaining too much weight.
Let me summarize for those who don't get it: A grandmother who is almost sixty wants a Wii. There are at least as many of them in the world as hardcore gamers, mostly because the hardcore gamers live in their basements.
For what it's worth, I'm a 25-year-old male, but not a hardcore gamer. I get about 1 hour a day of downtime, which is split between the Web and TV. I'd like to buy a Wii, but I have to save some money since my wife and I are having a kid in October. So I'm going to stick with my NES I picked up at a yard sale for $20 along with about 80 games. That is, unless they release Guitar Hero 2 for the Wii.
I'm in the hole of the broadband donut.
In all seriousness, my local EB Games (they still haven't converted to GameStop up here in the frozen north) has 8. The game rental chain (Microplay) has 3. Not to say they're not selling - I only finally managed to get one a few weeks ago - but they seem to be over the hump as far as supply/demand are concerned.
Godless heathen.
Wow. I have read a lot of weird car analogies on slashdot, but nothing quite like this.
Now, if you'll excuse me, I've got some idea balls to remove from a manatee tank.