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.

Comments

Re:But the games!

[Junta]

If you think that's bad, try the PS3...

Seriously, I have a Wii and a PS3 and I've found more interesting games for Wii than the PS3. However, some decent PS2 games have still been coming out.

Lifecycle?

[nobodyman]

Personally I've always thought of the Wii as more of a gimmick and that this was all a fad, but after 10 million units sold it's still going strong. So that shows what I know.

Still, I wonder if the Wii's lifecycle will be as long as the N64 and SNES. My personal experience is that my family and I really enjoyed the wii for the first few months, but now we find that we rarely play it. I tend to prefer my 360, and my daughter has gravitated to PC-based games like Webkinz and Nick Arcade. Also, while I think that Nintendo's first party titles are always pretty good, the 3rd party signal-to-noise ratio is getting worse and worse. Nintendo's E3 performance was roundly considered to be the worst of the big three -- even if you come at it from a non-hardcore perspective, they didn't outline as many exciting titles as in previous years.

So what do you guys think? Is the Wii popularity going to stay strong over the next three years, or is there going to be a drop off?

Re:more numbers

[moderatorrater]

For the US, there are still twice as many xboxs that have been sold than ps3s. If you include Europe, it's 1.5x as many. Japan, of course, skews those numbers worldwide, but there's still a wide gulf between the xbox and ps3 in terms of how many are actually in homes. Game makers are hesitant to release games for the ps3 exclusively, even when Sony offers a lot of money for that exclusivity. Hell, even Final Fantasy 13 isn't going to be exclusive, and their main line has been exclusive to the playstation since the ps1.

I expect that sales of the ps3 will continue to be high simply because it's a great blu ray player that gets most of the games that the xbox gets, but I doubt that they're going to sell games as fast as the xbox does and their hardware sales will fall dramatically this holiday season when a really good, relatively cheap blu-ray player comes out. The ps3 won't die or reach the levels of irrelevancy that the gamecube ever reached, but I doubt that it'll pass the 360.

Re:The question is, how long can they keep it up?

[Endo13]

After the poor show at E3, I'm starting to doubt whether Nintendo can hold on to its lead for much longer. They like to think that it's the casual games selling Wiis, but the AAA titles are what the hardcore gamers want - and it's the hardcore gamers who'll decide the outcome of the console wars.

That's the traditional mentality, and it's precisely why Playstation and Xbox are losing the sales competition this round. Hardcore gamers only determine the outcome of a war between "hardcore" consoles. Nintendo opted to tap into a whole new market, and did a very good job of it. Nintendo didn't have to put up a great show at E3 because a huge part of their target audience for the Wii are not people who would ever visit E3, or be interested in much of anything there.

Wii is the inexpensive system with the fun controller that people buy and play 15 minutes or an hour or two at a stretch when they have a little spare time. It's the system you buy in addition to your other entertainment equipment, including your other video game systems. Whether that's a PS3, 360, or a PC is almost irrelevant. They're doing the Zelda, Mario, and Metroid games just to satisfy the fans of those franchises and keep them coming back for more. As for the rest of the "hardcore" gaming crowd, Nintendo really doesn't need them or care about them.

In summary, the Wii is winning because it's really not in competition with the other consoles. It made a market of its own, where it really has no direct competition. In fact, I daresay the DS is more direct competition for the Wii than any other video game system.