New sales figures for Wii and DS

I read this topic here about the Xbox 360 and it resulted about Wii sales discussion.

www.listal.com/groups/viewthread/8230/

Well, I want to help you all out. Nintendo released their sales numbers today and boy, are they in charge right now.

Current hardware LTD:
NDS: 70.60m
NA: 22.39m
Japan: 22.38m
Other: 25.82m

Wii: 24.45m
NA: 10.61m
Japan: 5.90m
Other: 7.94m

Furthermore they expect to sell another 25 million Wii's this year.

Quite insane. 'Wii is a fad'... yeah.

the problem is only that nintendo doesn't sell many games (according to a statistic every wii-owner buys at average three wii-games while it is 6-10 for PS3 and xbox 360) with those wiis. on the other hand they even make some profit on the hardware itself, unlike sony and microsoft.

This is true.

The future bodes well though. Not only because with these sales figures, third parties can't find a way to ignore this system, also because in this same press release Nintendo announced to already have 26 million sellers on the Wii. Not bad at all.

well, actually they can. most of them don't make enough sales on wii to justify the horrendous development cost for this system, because they are forced to invent and implement new concepts for their games. however on ps3 and xbox they are able to just convert their "multi-platform" games quite easily, of course on basis of the least powerful platform (PC suffers most from this trend) and thus cashing in multiple times.

so in short there are only few third-party developers who won't shy the risk of financial desaster and make most use of the wiis capabilities. and even from these few most develop and publish mini-games. sooner or later you'll be stuck on the excellent inhouse-games from nintendo. but for me personally that's more than enough.

I know of this, but be honest: when there might be 50 million users in a year time, it's going to be down right hard for developers to ignore it. Most developers aren't even ignoring it, rather they were caught off guard by the success and are now beavering away on games.

Also, thanks to this, the quality of the lions share of third party Wii titles has been lacking quality.

It's true however that it is difficult to compete with Nintendo's own titles. If this will remain a problem even on Wii, it remains to be seen but since both N64 and GameCube haven't had, say 50 million owners, we don't know if its possible for a Nintendo console with that many owners to have room for great third party sales. My guess is that there will be room. 50 million users won't all by buying ONLY Nintendo games.

the problem is only that nintendo doesn't sell many games

you know, I too read articles that keep saying that same statistic, but FACT is #1 and #3 best selling games in March in canada were for the Wii, and Mario Kart Wii and Wii Fit are coming next.

but that's the dilemma: the few games that sell well are inhouse-games from nintendo. so this IS a frustrating situation for third-party publishers. that said, i think it's their own fault they don't use the wiis features more than in simple mini-game collections...

Er... without wanting to get into too much of a figures war, recent data shows the Wii attach rate to be 3.7, while the PS3 and 360's rates are 4.6 and 4.7 respectively. Given rough sales figures for the consoles, that's around 4m more titles than Microsoft and roughly 34m more than Sony.

It's entirely true that many of the best selling titles are Nintendo ones - around half of the top 25 - but that's not to say that 3rd party titles don't sell. 12 3rd party titles have broken the 1m sales mark, the same number as have in on the PS3 including those developed by Sony backed studios, while development costs are significantly lower; figures suggest costs are typically between a quarter and a half of X360 or PS3 games due to the fact that assets don't need to be as detailed, the fact that the hardware is similar to the GameCube, so few new programming techniques are needed and so on. Indeed, Zack & Wiki was profitable for Capcom with less than 0.35m sales worldwide to date.

To be fair, for some studios, developing for the Wii doesn't make sense - most of Rockstar's titles wouldn't lend themselves to the Wii, for a variety of reasons - but as Capcom (for example) are finding, it's proving a more profitable console to develop for others.

Nintendo and Nintendo 64 Vs. the Segas, the Segas definitely won that one, though back then the gap wasn't to bad

After GC came out, Nintendo picked up, but PS and PS2 quickly put it's graphics back down to crapa nd the fact that PS2 could play PS games made it all the better

Nintendo of course, has the Gameboys and all that crap, so this makes up for their low graphis then, but then Sony came out with the PSP... of course Xbox came out, and now...

Xbox 360 looks like the best console if you want lot of games
however PS3 is coming out there slowly
Wii is apparently obssessed with new wiimotes and other hardware, more then games. NDS is doing well, lots of people buy it seeing as it is cheaper then PSP.

However, Wii sales would Skyrocket(I MEAN SKYROCKET) if they took the Phantasy Star Episodes and reinvented them with better graphics.

The Phantasy Star Games are some of the TOP Gamecube games, back when PSO was inthe possession of Sony, it was one of the games that ws amazingly good for a game from that generation.

PSO already pwned Halo as far as content and depth went, however it's crappy graphics and horrible design features causedit to fail in the long run. Nobody cares about content anymore, they see awesome detail and design next to a poor design box, they are going to choose the awesome detailed one.

Nintendo FINALLY has the means to get the graphics that Phantasy Star needed and they don't bother... I'm sorry but... IDIOTS! I know HUNDREDS of people who prefer gamecube BECAUSE it has PSO, After playing PSO(Especially Online Mode) Once, you will ALWAYS want to play it at SOME point.
The other problem was that in Gamecube, the PSO disks were very fragile, one scratch could destroy millions of pieces of data. With Wii, they can probably make the disks BETTER and reinforce them so the data can't be damaged as easily


In short, Nintendo needs to reinvent PSO to get EVEN more sales then what they are anticipating... But they probably won't do this... in fact, I kinda hope Sony gets their paws of PSO again so they can make it EVEN better

Nintendo needs to reinvent PSO? It's not even their game... and it has a small but strong following, but surely not enough to skyrocket Wii sales (although it doesn't really need anymore sales considering outside of Japan its still difficult to buy one).