Quote:Original post by eedok

Quote:Original post by Moe
Nintendo may not be doing so well in the console market, but in the handheld market it seems to be doing really quite well (to my knowledge).

Nintendo isn't doing well in the handheld market, they're absolutely dominating it. It's outselling the PSP at a great pace, Gizmondo's parent company is out of business and the GP2X is still a handheld nearly no one has heard of.

Are you sure about that? Figures I've seen suggest otherwise. The DS is certanly winning in software sales, but in terms of actual unit sales, the PSP and DS seem to be fairly evenly matched. It's also worth noting that according to these figures, Nintendo only has the advantage in Japan, even when it comes to software.

Of course, I'm not saying the DS is doing poorly, but I wouldn't say it's dominating.

Sony is wary of Nintendo in Japan. As everyone knows Nintendo isn't coming out with this Wii "non-traditional input, games for non-gamers" approach blindly. They first tested the waters with a portable version of the Wii strategy with the Nintendo DS.

Currently the Nintendo DS is doing...well...in Japan. The hardware is outselling (actual sales, not the Sony prefered "shipped units") by about 10 to 1 - As of August and early September the Nintendo DS weekly sales are about 230K, compared to 27K and 22K for the PSP and PS2. Of course since Sony still uses the loss model console sales aren't the number one indicator: They could still be dominating if they sold 20 games to each customer while Nintendo only sold one.

So lets look at the weekly sales figures for Japan when it comes to the games. Since December/January Nintendo has been steadily rising on the charts, taking the number one spot with games like NintenDogs. It's now reached a point where Nintendo completely owns the top 10 weekly seller list - most weeks in August/September the Nintendo DS held 7 or more of the top 10 game spots (and often 1 of the remaining spots was held by a GBA game).

At the end of August Nintendo did the unthinkable and took over the entire chart - every game in the top 10 list was a Nintendo DS game. More so the numbers are staggering: Nintendo isn't holding the top 10 by a few hundred or thousands extra units per week, their top selling games are outselling even the best from Sony (Microsoft doesn't even exist) by factors as high as 50 to 1.

Japan is crazy for Nintendo's new approach to gaming. Sony is coming to market with a 5 year old forumla console bigger then the original XBox (Japanese homes are very small, resulting in consumers greatly prefering compact items - even watermelons are sold in specially grown square shapes at a premium price because they will take up less fridge space). Sony is very afraid for the Japanese market, the one place they might have hoped to find refuge from the XBox 360 and it's dominance of North America.

Quote:Original post by Mithrandir

Quote:Original post by capn_midnight
Eh, I could see this as being an half-baked marketing scheme that was intended all along: announce an obscenely high price point1, wait for the outrage, then drop the price before launch.

1The latest copy of GameInformer did a launch-price-adjusted-for-inflation chart, comparing all of the major console in the last 35 years. While the PS3 is higher than the average, it's not higher by much. It's beaten out by 6 consoles out of a list of 20 (it being one of them), the Atari VCS at $672 (originally $200), the Matell Intellivision $838($299), the Neo Geo $1012 ($650), the 3DO $968($700), and the Sega Saturn $533($399). Of the sub-$300 machines, The SNES $297($199), N64 $258($199), Dreamcast $244($200), and GameCube $228($199), only the SNES was anything but marginally succesful.

N64: 32,930,000 sold
Gamecube: 20,610,000 sold

I have a hard time understanding your "marginal" label. Hell, the XBox sold 24,000,000, does that mean it's marginal too?



On a side note: I am surprised to learn that the Gamecube sold less than the N64, considering the quality of games on the GC was significantly better than the N64.

The GC did not sell like the N64 because of it's so-called "kiddie image"

It was portrayed as a system for little kids, regardless of the quality of it's games.

Those figures only include Japan and North America, not the rest of the world. At any rate, it certanly seems a lot has changed in Japan since march. I find it interesting to note that the figures I linked to however (which come from Nintendo, Sony, and Microsoft, not the actual retail outlets), indicate that in march the PSP had made 10 million software sales in Japan, yet the retail sales figures indicate it's less than 7 million to date.