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Wii Is the New US Console Leader
stoolpigeon writes with this snippet from an AFP story carried by Google: "Nintendo said Thursday that its globally popular Wii has become the top-selling video game console in the United States, a crown coveted by rivals Microsoft and Sony. Market-tracking firm NPD Group reports that 666,000 Wii consoles were sold in the United States in June, raising the total sales count in the country to nearly 10.9 million units." I'd rather play board games than video games, but the Wii Fit makes one of these tempting anyhow.
This Bloomberg article also gives the numbers for PS3 and 360s in June. 405,500 and 219,800, respectively. Which is more interesting to me. The way people talk about the hard times the PS3 is having, I was surprised that it is outselling the Xbox.
Free the Quark 3 from asymptotic confinement! Bring your charm! Don't get down! All colours and flavours welcome!
I haven't played the Wii's iteration of Mario Kart, which I probably should rent, but I have a feeling it's not much better (although, feel free to enlighten me on this).
The online play with Mario Kart (at least for me, over wireless attached to a cable modem) is worlds better than SSBB. Almost lag-free, doesn't take 10 minutes to find enough people for a match, etc.
Actually I read somewhere that they are sending most of the Wii consoles to Europe due to the falling dollar. Which makes sense,as they can get more money for the same unit by shipping there instead of the USA. Maybe when the recession is over and the dollar picks back up(if we don't end up sliding into another great depression) then we will see plenty of Wii consoles here. Until then it only makes sense to go where the money is. But that's my 02c based on what I read,YMMV
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
If online gaming is essential to you then that's why you don't see any games worth playing. There's no question that the Wii needs to pick up the game in the online arena to attract that crowd although the 360's latest offerings seem to take a bit from both the Wii and the PS3.
To name a few worthy games IMO:
Of course it's a matter of opinion, but there are at least ten solid titles IMO. I own all three systems and I find myself gaming on my PC & DS more than all three combined. The PS3 library is sparse. Most 360 games offer a similar feel and Live isn't that interesting for me.
Or use the Wii Tracker. It checks several stores online. In about a week of using the RSS feed, I found a bundle containing games that I wanted, some extra controllers that I would've wanted anyway, and didn't have any junk in it that I didn't want. You can probably find just the console, but I only saw one while watching the tracker and it sold out quickly.
This is here so you don't ignore the last two lines of my posts.
10.9+ million WoW players, but that's globally. About the same number of AMERICANS own a Wii. According to nexgenwars.com, there have been over 22 million Wiis sold.
And the DS? According to wikipedia:
"As of March 31, 2008, sales of the DS Lite have reached 51.78 million units worldwide."
As a PC Gamer who dabbles in console gaming, I'm not afraid to admit that console gaming is bigger. But I also know that the mouse/keyboard is the best way to control FPS and RTS games, so I'm not afraid of PC Gaming dying any time soon.
Not a Twitter sockpuppet... but I wish I was.
Yes, I am sure they do have people doing capacity planning. I am sure that time to market became a consideration so they did not want sit a stack a warchest of them in their warehouse, not to mention the risk had they not been big sellars, they know like all products in the electronics market demand will taper off no matter what they do in the end. Which would mean that not building out a lot more manufacturing facility might be wise, even if it means you can't sell as many units, because what will you do with it after the popularity fades?
Nintendo started off stockpiling a warehouse full of Wiis; they had a ridiculously successful launch in terms of consoles available on day 1. When even that wasn't enough to fill the demand, they increased their manufacturing capacity by 50%. This is not a simple thing to do, either, and constitutes risk like you say. Even still, wiis are hard to find.
It's time for people like the OP to wake up. Nintendo is not creating an artificial shortage. Nintendo is making and selling wiis as fast as it can; they have no reason not to unless you imagine Big N has a magical machine that can turn hype into money without having anything to sell. Whether you want to admit it or not, the answer is simple: The reason wiis are hard to find is because they really are selling that well. With numbers like the ones in the article, any other explanation sounds really, really stupid.
They are selling the units they can produce where the currency offers them the best excahnge rate so they take the most profit. Why they don't raise prices since the market will obviously bare it, I don't know, Good Will?
Well half the value proposition for the Wii is that it's cheap. Nintendo has always wanted their systems to be affordable, and isn't going to throw away that strategy/reputation any time soon. Especially in this generation -- half the strategy of getting the "casual gamer" aka the non-gamer to buy the Wii is the price, to make it seem worth taking a chance on. Far fewer people would want one if it cost more, so keeping the price low is their way of keeping demand high. That's my take anyway.
Note that this also shows how stupid the 'artificial shortage' theory is. Why would they create an artificial shortage, and then not charge more, resulting in them making less money over time?
The enemies of Democracy are
Bit more info:
PS2: 300MHz MIPS CPU, no L2 cache but there's 16K of on-chip "scratch RAM" that's used to get around that limitation. 32 MB of RAM, though 1 MB is reserved for Sony's micro-kernel (or whatever). Two independent vector units. One is attached to the CPU and can either run independently or it acts as a SIMD unit for the CPU. It's actually semi-useless as an independent unit due to restrictions on how you can DMA out of it, but some developers find a good use for it. The second unit is attached to the rasterizer and is the programmable transform unit. There's an entire PS1 console in there. You can use it's CPU and everything if you like. Usually it just handles I/O (since the controllers and memory cards are physically attached to it and the actual PS2 just DMA's in/out of its memory to get data). Fixed function texturing and lighting with semi-broken blend modes. Vast amounts of fill rate. God's own DMA controller. Direct access to every memory address and register in the box (though a few are off limits).
Wii: 729 MHz PowerPC with 256K L2 cache and SIMD extensions; 88MB of stupidly fast (or so goes my understanding - I base that on my colleagues' assertions) RAM; fixed function transform unit; up to 8 textures per pass (1 texture per clock) with programmable blending. No idea what the API is like. My best guess is it's direct access to the hardware like the PS2.
360: Three PowerPC CPUs running at 3.2 GHz with two hardware threads each. Effective clock rate is lower since cache-misses are obscenely expensive. One SIMD vector unit per CPU. 1 MB L2 cache on each CPU. 512 MB unified memory. Blazing fast GPU with lots of fill rate, but there are restrictions on the frame buffer (as it is held in special uber-fast on-chip RAM in the GPU). Fully programmable transformation (with the ability to pull and push data to arbitrary memory locations). Fully programmable texturing and shading. Fixed-function blending. Mini OS is always running in the background. All drawing done through D3D9-like API. Dashboard can hijack your frame buffer or input (or anything, really) any time it likes to do fancy XBOX stuff.
So yeah, completely dissimilar.
Yup.