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Wii 2 Delay Is Hurting Nintendo
BanjoTed writes "Michael Pachter's ongoing spat with Nintendo regarding the Wii 2 is well documented. Pachter is sure it's coming, Nintendo says it's not. Now the analyst has gone one further by claiming that the declining sales of the Wii documented in the platform holder's recent financial statements will only get worse unless it speeds up attempts to get its successor to market. He said, 'The reason for this is clear: the software being created is just not interesting enough or compelling enough to drive Wii owners to buy more than two [games] per year, and most of those purchases are first party software. We can blame the third party publishers for making shovelware, or for misjudging the Wii market, but the simple fact is that the publishers have to develop completely separate games for the Wii because its CPU is not powerful.'"
Who is Michael Pachter and why is anyone supposed to care what he thinks?
Calling Michael Pachter an analyst is akin to calling your local butcher a surgeon. This so called analyst has a long history of ridiculous claims.
FYI, Current Weekly sales of the Wii are almost equal to the combined totals of the ps3 and xbox 360 and they still make money on the hardware. While sure their sales are declining somewhat it probably has more to do with market saturation than anything else. I am sure another version is coming some day but at this point I would think the still rather good sales would be seriously undermined if they released information on a replacement version.
So what if it sucks? it's cheap to produce and sells acceptably well. While Sony and Microsoft lost a fortune with their super-duper-powerful machines, Nintendo is profitable all the way. IT PRINTS MONEY!
Circumcision is child abuse.
At the moment Nintendo's problem is a mere reduction in profit.
Pachter's advice is to join the ranks of the PS3/Xbox360 but the makers of those consoles have struggled to turn any profit in the relevant sections of their company.
Boffoonery - downloadable Comedy Benefit for Bletchley Park
Sells acceptably well? Hell, I wouldn't be surprised if sales of the Wii are declining because everyone has one. I know I would have bought one ages ago if I could figure out how to make it work with one of my computers.
Look - almost one in ten people in Japan own a Wii. One in thirty people in the Americas own one, and this is including South American countries that don't have nearly as much wealth as the United States. I would argue that everyone who wants a Wii has one at this point, and that's why sales are dropping off - not due to lack of interest so much as a lack of people to sell to.
Now Nintendo has basically two options; either drop the price even further, which will probably not do all that much because $200 is an entirely reasonable price point, or ramp up their cloning efforts and create more people to buy Wiis.
I don't know if you've been paying attention for the past few years, but Nintendo has been making money hand over fist since the Wii was released. Unlike Microsoft and Sony, Nintendo doesn't use their console as a loss leader, they make a ton of cash with each sale, and make money on the games as well. This 'analyst' hasn't analyzed very well.
Qxe4
You could actually look it up, and you would see that the Wii is still doing better at this point then the PS2 was doing this many weeks after launch.
Spooooon!!!!!
Even assuming he's right about the numbers - and that's a big ass-u-mtpion - his assertion that it's because new games aren't compelling is just that: an assertion.
He hasn't considered the alternative: that the Wii has so many good pick-up-and-play games with compelling gameplay that owners are actually happy re-playing what they already own, rather than feeling inadequate if they don't upgrade to MurderSportsStealthSim 14.
Since that's the entire raison d'être of the Wii, and the reason why it's destroying the 360 and PS3 in hardware sales, who am I going to believe? Nintendo from their platinum clad fortress inside a moat of liquid gold, or some pissant intertubes nobody who's been wrong about every other Goddamn thing he's ever said?
By the way, do you know what a rhetorical question is?
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.