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The Latest From the Front in the Console Wars
The October NPD numbers are out, and (now that we know we'll keep getting the information) it's time once again for analysis and reaction from media and businesses alike. GameDaily has a one year later look at the fight that began last holiday season. As for the numbers themselves, with Halo 3 now a known quantity in the market the 360 is down to 366,000 from 527,800 in September. Microsoft is still quite happy with software sales, though. The PS3 only saw 121,000 units sold last month, but early news from November has Sony very excited. And all the while, somehow, the Wii manages to sell even more units. The system is up to 519,000 from 501,000 in September, with the DS slight down to 458,000 from 495,800. As the GameDaily analysis article concludes: "the race for console dominance is still anyone's to win. The 2007 holiday buying season will be crucial to setting all three players' market positions going into next year. Which is all nice to know, of course, but not that important to actually enjoying your system of choice well into the future."
Maybe. I tend to agree, but the article had a couple good points. if Wii owners don't keep buying games, did Nintendo really win? Also, Final Fantasy is likely to sell a lot of Playstations. Many FF fans are in the same category of rabid loyalty as Halo fans, and they'll shell out the green just to play the next one.
I got a hold of a Wii from a friend for "long-term" borrowing pretty early on after launch and kept it for about 5 months. Initially I had a ton of fun playing Wii Sports just about every night, I even rented games like Red Steel and Wario etc to try out the software for the system. I was unimpressed in general with the types of games they were putting out on the system, just like when I owned a Gamecube and only loved Rogue Squadron and Eternal Darkness for it. Not being a huge modern metroid game fan, and finding that I was unimpressed with Zelda on the Wii, I eventually passed the console back to my friend and went back to playing my 360 / PC.
I guess it all boils down to the type of software made for a particular system, but the article's analysis of software attach rate was interesting in that the Wii's is so low. I do continue to buy games for my 360 even 2 years later (Gears of War, PGR 4, Halo 3, Bioshock, Mass Effect, AC etc) yet nothing but Mario would interest me on the Wii right now. Many of my friends have the same opinions and the initial fad of playing Wii sports has worn off. Plus, its pretty bad that the most popular game on your system is the one you give away for free with the system (yes, everyone has it so they likely try it, but still, in my experience it was by far the most fun to be had on the Wii at least through when I gave the console back to my friend).
"To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield." - Tennyson
Exactly, has anyone played Mario galaxy? Point-set-match. Owning both Halo 3 and Galaxy, Galaxy is by far a superior game. Halo 3 is great, but is a stepped up Halo 2, and doesn't try to do anything new, I played it every night when it first came out, but now its down to a night per week or so, which is how much I was playing Halo 2 when Halo 3 came out. Anyways, Wii also has the fantastic quality of having a buzz about how cool it is. What does this mean? Its a magnet for getting girls to come to my dorm room. "Oh, you have a Wii, guy I met yesterday, we should get together and play that sometime." Its happened at least 6 times to me in the past year. The Wii get-together also makes a great follow-up date, because its laid back, fun, and is a good way to get to know someone.
Yes, Nintendo won even if people stop buying games for it. It's the third party developers that get screwed at that point. That being said I don't think that will be the case though. The Wii is in an adjustment period. The DS went through the same thing. Developers are still trying to adapt to the system and find out what does and does not work with it. When the DS first came out the only decent games were for the most part created by Nintendo with most of the third party games being mediocre. The Wii is going through the same thing now. Almost all the good games are by Nintendo with the third party items (for the most part) being decidedly mediocre. With luck however the developers will pull through and we'll start to see games from third parties soon every bit as polished and fun as Nintendo's own offerings.
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Yes, actually. Because Nintendo made a profit on the Wii from Day #1. As other console manufacturers optimize their manufacturing costs to produce their consoles at a lower loss (or simply reduce the street price and take the same loss), Nintendo's profit margins simply grow as they optimize their processes. Thus Nintendo "wins" regardless.
The real question is, what happens to the game producers? The argument exists that if the Wii wins, all we'll end up with is Mario and Wii Sports. To which I think it's important to turn around that argument and look at it from another angle. Nintendo currently has about 14 million consoles out there, and a shipped Wii is effectively a sold Wii. Thus the Wii presents a tremendous opportunity to game producers.
This huge market payed $250 for Wii Sports. As a game producer, it then becomes your job to understand that market and produce more content for it. More to the point, it becomes the job of game producers to produce content that the market wants. Wii players are less likely to want Assassin's Creed or Call of Duty 4. (Oh look, another military FPS! Who would have thought?) So stop trying to sell them the same games you've been selling teenage boys, and start doing some market research. Make games that are compelling to the casual market, and you will win.
The best part? You don't even have to spend tens of millions on the game! A sizable sum of Wii players are attracted to casual games, which have far, far lower budgets than the so-called "triple-A" titles. Perhaps this generation could even see the downloadable game surpassing the sales of the traditional shrink-wrapped game. (If Nintendo ever gets off their butts and offers WiiWare games, that is.
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You've got it backwards. The majority of the Wii target audience aren't gamers, the proper question is "Why would they start buying games"?
The "big games" are still all aimed at the PS3 and the 360 because that's where the gamers will end up. The Wii could end up moving the most hardware, but end up selling fewer games than the PS3 or the 360. That's the danger of selling your console to a very, very casual set of gamers who might never feel the need to buy another game for their console after they've found one they enjoy diddling with.
Fanatically anti-fanatical
I really think that the whole idea of a console war is dated.
There was a time when this was an issue. When disposable incomes were lower. When gaming was mostly for kids. When there weren't multiple demographics interested in different kinds of gaming. When a console wasn't also an Internet device and a media (music and movies) device as well.
Now, the game has changed. There is room for an inexpensive console with novelty appeal, health-conscious appeal, and appeal to kids-- and still room for a midrange console with testosterone games for the fratboy crowd-- and still room for a high-end machine with a scary sticker price but very impressive graphics, a blu-ray player, and the occasional hit exclusive game.
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What's more, Nintendo has increased Wii production to currently 1.8 million per month.
That's 21.6 million per year, or over 100 million in just 5 years. If they keep this up, they might even catch up with the PS2!
Count yourself lucky you have a Wii, I can't buy one in the UK for love nor money. The shops in London all get small batches which sell out on the day they come in.
For games, check out the Wii section of Metacritic. If you stick with only the green rated games, you're looking at Super Mario Galaxy, Zelda, Resident Evil 4, Metroid and Zack & Wiki as 5 to start off with.
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What I want to know is, when the hell is someone going to make the sword/lightsaber game for the Wii that we've all been waiting for. This comes up every now and then and the apologists all jump out and say "Errors in the motion sensors add up so you can't make perfect 1 to 1 movements, blah, blah, blah."
Which is all a bunch of BS. OK you can't make perfect 1 to 1 movement with perfectly free movement of the sword, but you don't need to! I've already seen "good enough" control to make the sword/lightsaber game possible!
Go load up Wii Sports. Choose Baseball for 2 players (so you can play around without a pitch coming). Grab the control for the batter and tip/twirl the Wiimote around over your shoulder. Notice how the Mii tips/twirls the bat just like you? Now, just change it from a bat to a sword, move it from over-the-shoulder to waist level in front of the player, and put the camera behind the Mii (KOTOR style). There, you just made the greatest sword game ever without even doing anything clever.
And of course there's bound to be lots of clever stuff you can figure out like motion capturing a bunch of kids playing with fake swords (with wiimotes embedded) so you can map the wiimote acceleration profiles to expected real life movements. Or correcting for the small integration errors whenever the wiimote happens to swing past the sensor bar. That's just icing on the cake that makes the control even closer to what's expected.
Yeah the control will never be exactly 1 to 1. Olympic fencers will be pissed off that they can't get the millimeter perfect movements they use. Everyone else will be wildly flailing their swords with big broad movements so as long a the sword goes left when they swing left it will be fine. The players' hand/eye coordination will adjust to what the game will actually do. Players already adjust to controls that are much less intuitive/realistic. Just throw in a few easy "whack the pinata" levels at the beginning and I bet people will subconsciously adjust themselves in no time.
I think the biggest winner in this console war is IBM. They make the chips for all three consoles. With the pretty competitive market they are selling a lot of CPU, and getting handed a lot of research dollars for die shrinks. I also think this market which is a win for IBM and a loss for attach rate.
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I don't know if I qualify as a hard-core gamer, whatever that is. I own a Cube, an Xbox, a PS2, a DS, a PC whose primary use is gaming, and I just got a Wii for my birthday a few months ago. I spend about $100 a month on games, maybe $750 on average for PC hardware. So that's where I'm coming from. I don't own any Halo t-shirts, though, so I'm not sure if I'd pass. That being said, I spend about three hours a day, more on weekends, playing video games. From this perspective, I gotta say the only console I was interested in was the Wii.
The way I saw it, and the way I still see it, all the other consoles are basically hamstrung PCs. Games aside, I could build a computer that did everything the PS3 does, hook up a controller to it, and have the exact same experience. The Wii, while not as beefy hardware-wise, has the whole control system going for it. So from my pseudo-hardcore perspective, I have the option of dropping several hundred dollars on a console and dropping several hundred dollars in to my computer to gain access to essentially two overlapping libraries of games (since, especially with the 360, many of the big games are available on PC), or spend a couple hundred on a console and several hundred on my computer and have access to two rather different libraries of games. Easy choice for me.
Now, Nintendo is grabbing up market share by selling to the casual gamer crowd with both the Wii and the DS. If you look at the ads for the Wii, they're basically saying to the consumer, "A console is a centerpiece in your entertainment center or living room. Buy a 360 or a PS3 and you'll have a rather expensive additional DVD player and have to hope that whichever one you buy is using the standard (HD or Blu-ray) that becomes dominant. And you'll need an HD tv to get the most out of it. And all the games are geared toward teenage boys and college students. Buy a Wii, on the other hand, and not only will you save money, but you can use it with the television you already have. You won't be able to play movies on it, but you probably don't need another DVD player. And, you can play games with everyone in your family. And furthermore, these games are physically active, so you won't feel bad about your kids playing them." It's working because any "hardcore" gamers who want the Wii already have it, and they're waiting for 3rd party developers to get on board, which they are, and to see more adult-oriented (read: violent) games to be released, which they also are, albeit slowly. They really needed the parents to get behind them. Even the price is geared toward reluctant parents and older adults in that it's not such an expensive commitment as a 360 or, god forbid, a PS3.
As a caveat, let me just say that as fanboish as that sounded, I personally like both of the other consoles, and if they were cheaper I'd probably pick them up. I'm just saying that, for my part, the Wii has the most bang for the buck, and I know that my girlfriend, based on fights we've had, definitely considers me a "hardcore" gamer.
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It's Ironic that Nintendo captured the casual market and yet there are very few games for them, they either fall under the "core-gamer category" (RE4, Metroid3, etc...) or the "Shovelware" (Too many to mention actually) category. I own a Wii with something like 15 Wii games, and 2 dozen VC games. I love it, and play it often. My parents enjoyed WiiSports so much they wanted one of their own for when they have company over. They are as "non-gamer" as can be, but are not opposed to buying games anymore as long as they appeal to them. To date they only have 3 games (WiiSports, WiiPlay, and Tiger Woods 08) and 1 VC game (PacMan). Occasionally I bring over Rayman RR, or Excitetruck and we play them a little, but that's it. They are both retired, have time and money available to them, but there is simply not a selection of games they find appealing.
Nintendo is moving units to casual gamers, but they (and 3rd parties) need to recognize this largely untapped market and deliver some games they want to buy! Guitar Hero Helps, so does DDR, and Karaoke games, but what about SuDoKu, or NY Times Crossword puzzles...
The PS3 is flopping horribly in this department for reasons I cannot fathom.
I think this statement alone sheds light on your entire misguided post.
--Jeremy
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