Wii-Haw! Nintendo Tops Monthly Console Sales Again

Via Personal Tech

With Nintendo's Wii still dominating the Xbox 360 and the PlayStation 3 in terms of sales, many wonder whether the Wii's performance can be sustainable. The question will be whether players will continue to be captivated by the Wii as game developers start taking advantage of the superior processing power of the PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360.

The Nintendo Wii video game console continued its remarkable performance in April, with U.S. sales that far outpaced its next-gen rivals, Microsoft Relevant Products/Services's Xbox 360 and Sony Relevant Products/Services's PlayStation 3. According to figures compiled by NPD Group, the Wii sold 360,000 units in April compared to 174,000 Xbox 360s and just 82,000 PlayStation 3s.

According to David Riley, a Senior Manager at NPD Group, that puts the Wii's total sales since its release at 2.5 million units, a little less than half of the Xbox 360's 5.4 million total units sold, and roughly twice the PlayStation 3's 1.3 million. All sales figures are for the U.S. alone.

Riley said that it's not easy to summarize why the Wii is performing so well. "There are a lot of reasons," he said. "Nintendo has done great marketing for the [console], and after a slow start, has gotten great PR from the media. The [Wii] is remarkably easy to use, and of course, the price point helps as well."

Mass-Market Appeal

"The price points for the PlayStation 3 and the Xbox 360 are a killer when it comes to attracting the masses," Riley suggested. "They're not unattractive to the hard-core gamers, but they're simply not mass-market prices."

With a bewildering array of technological choices out there, Riley said, a lot of consumers find the complexity of the Xbox 360 and the PlayStation 3 to be intimidating.

"The very fact that the Wii doesn't use a lot of cutting-edge technology -- apart from the controller, of course -- gives it an edge," he said. "You can really start using the [Wii] without looking at the manual, and when you do need to read the manual, it's actually quite understandable."

Sustainable Lead?

Of particular interest to analysts (and the console manufacturers, of course) is whether the Wii's impressive performance is sustainable. The chief question will be whether players will continue to be captivated by the Wii's motion-based controls as game manufacturers start taking advantage of the other units' greater processing power.

Riley cautioned that the remarkable sales figures for the Wii only represent the first six months of sales, so it is not clear how it will perform in the long run. However, he said he thinks that the system will continue to be a hit with consumers.

"The Wii's started to take some hits in the media lately," Riley said, "but I think it will continue to do well. Nintendo's got a great line of titles coming out for the system, and excellent hardware Relevant Products/Services. But the company's biggest advantage is that it is attracting an audience that neither Microsoft nor Sony can attract. Nintendo just needs to keep coming out with titles that appeal to these nontraditional gamers."

I'm tired of listening to all these analysts. Everytime they say something, they do so as it's the last word and written on stone.

Before the Wii came out the majority of analysts didn't even consider the Wii in their forecasts. They said the PS3 would take the market by storm, which was a view that many people (and now hardly anyone) held.

The reality is that now they've seen what a phenomenon the Wii has become and are recalculating their predictions according to the Wii performance so far.

The Wii's sales could not be accurately estimated easily because it's such a different product to the other consoles, and there really is very little in the way of precedents to launch an authoritative estimate of future Wii sales. Even now, sales are still constrained by limited supply, so what do these analysts really know about the real demand for the console.

They continue to speak authoritatively as if their calculations are even slightly worthy of attention. Worst still, they question the longetivity of the interest of casual gamers on the Wii and the console's lifespan. For god's sake, what do they know! I don't know, Microsoft and Sony don't know. Nintendo's Wii has been an extraordinary turn of the videogames industry and I believe it's incredibly hard to make any predictions because there is nothing much to base them on.

If anything, they should recognise that they got it wrong before and they should emphasise caution when making further estimates.

yet again the wii proves that its no toy.

alienanthropologist, these analist's job is to predict the past before the others. They only predict based in what have happened, and the ones who catch first the changes in the market gain some atention.

In fact, that's why they are analists, otherwise they would have been executives...