Poor Sony
Who would have thought a year ago that Sony would be a beleaguered also ran compared to Nintendo? In this most recent article I read it shows that the Wii outsold the PS3 in Japan a whopping 6 to 1. Prior to the Wii, I had long discussions with Scott about how I thought Nintendo was over (he, of course didn’t think so) - I just did not see how they could overcome the crushing bruising they were getting from the PS2 and XBox. Fortunately, Nintendo flipped that whole script and found a brand new target audience, changed all the rules of the game and now has a market cap bigger than Sony’s (who has 8x the sales of Nintendo). Nintendo’s bigger than Sony?? Poor Sony, if only they had smart leadership - they should have stayed an engineering company.
Here’s the killer - the Wii’s lead was 4:1 in April, 5:1 in May and now is 6:1. Nintendo’s not just crushing them, it’s gaining steam. What’s more is that the total numbers are all high - 271k in June vs 250k in May vs 360k in April. I wonder if these numbers (for the Wii) are manufacturing constrained - it seems to me there’s still no widespread availability of the Wii and if there was would that increase the total numbers sold even more?
I’ve long railed about increasing complexity of games and that more and more controls doesn’t make the game better. For the hardcore amongst us, perhaps it does, but for the casual player and me, I’m happy to pick up a game where I don’t need to read an instruction manual to learn how to play it. Yay for Nintendo!
July 2nd, 2007 at 9:36 pm
I agree. I tried playing a new shooter on the xBox with my girlfriend’s son. How many buttons does that damn controller have? It took me an hour just to figure out how to move around. I kept changing the view and always ended up looking into the sky while running into a wall! Blech!