As for forecasts, Clyde Montevirgen, the S&P Equity Research analyst BW spoke to, says there will likely be two winners because hardcore gamers have gotten older and there are more casual gamers that don’t care about hardcore features. He doesn’t say which two will win, but my personal opinion steers me towards PS3 and the Wii.
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Josh Goldman
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January 23, 2007
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i would like to see the figures after you factor in how many PS3 were returned!
Wii Rules
Im going to have to disagree that the two winners will be the Wii and the PS3. The 360 is in a much better position to beat the PS3 (and maybe the Wii, I don’t think anyone can predict what the market will look like for that at the moment). There are a few reasons that support this theory. First of all the 360 is still selling faster then the PS3 and continues to get cheaper (this while we hear that the PS3 is not likely to be any cheaper any time soon). Additionally the shortage cannot be used as an excuse anymore, demand is just not high for the PS3 as evident by the fact that you can go to bestbuy.com right now and order one. In comparison the 360 shortage lasted well into the new year and whenever there is a rumor that Wiis will be available people go crazy. It is still possible that the PS3 will get a slow start and win out on pure power alone. I, however, doubt it as this did not work for many systems in the past including the XBOX.
One side of things I never see comments on is the developer community. The PS3 is a pain in the butt to develop for. Sony’s tools are less than friendly and getting all those bits of tech buried in the PS3 to play nice with each other is apparently very very difficult. The Xbox development environment is a breeze in comparison with robust easy to use tools. Why is this important? Console sales are driven largely by titles once the market starts to mature. I’m guessing Xbox developers will outnumber PS3 developers by a big margin.
Another key factor is price.
Nintendo alledgedly make money on the Wii out of the gate (smart cookies!). As their volume goes up it will be very easy to cut the cost of manufacturing, sell it for less and still make money.
With the volume of sales on Xbox360, I’d be willing to bet MS are seeing plenty of reductions in manufacturing costs. They’ll be in a strong position to drop prices too.
Sony on the other hand are bogged down with the blu-ray and semi-proprietary processors etc. Couple that with low sales volume, the amount of money they are already losing per unit AND the incomprehensible mess that is Sony. They won’t be able to drop price any time soon.
I predict Wii & Xbox360 will rule in the long term, unless Sony really gets its act together…
You know, people need to start mentioning that Sony didn’t/still doesn’t have as many consoles available to ship, thus it’s impossible for them to win a numbers game.
Josh Goldman is totally missing the boat.
It is obvious the Wii is totally popular and that 360 is in a strong position. Sony is dropping the ball. They even don’t allow porn on Blue Ray. How stupid is that when their target audience is male 18-25? HD DVD is half as cheaper for both consumer and retailers as well.
Sony has totally screwed up and has to really do some magic to do a 180.
I see PS3’s everywhere in retail stores around the Dallas area, but I’ve talked to several Gamestop, Best Buy and Fry’s employee’s who have all said that nobody’s buying the PS3. It looks to me like the N. American sales surge when it first came out was just people wanting to sell them on eBay, and now that it’s actually just the people who want the system, everyone who does (and can afford it) seems to already have it.
That may change once there are some killer PS3 exclusives out there, but with so many titles going non-exclusive it will take more than just MGS and FF XIII to do it in my opinion. If Kingdom Hearts stays Sony exclusive, Motorstorm and Lair all look as good when they ship as they do now, that will probably help, but that’ll be Summer at least before that happens. Lair keeps getting pushed back which is a real shame since that’s the PS3 system seller title for me (MGS is boring compared to Splinter Cell! There – I said it!).
I was fortunate enough to get all 3 systems prior to Christmas and I’m not a fanboy to any of them. But my PS3 is sitting there idle. Occasionally I’ll rent a BluRay disk from Netflix so that I can convince myself it wasn’t a complete waste of money until Motorstorm comes out *sigh*. The Wii is a huge hit at family get-togethers, with everyone from my 65 year old mom to my 5 year old daughter completely into it. Still, for games, the 360 just blows the other two away right now. It doesn’t matter to me how long it’s been out. The games right NOW are much more fun and look amazing. In a year the 360 games out will be Bioshock, Mass Effect, Halo 3, Assassin’s Creed and GTA. I just don’t see Sony pulling this one out of their hat. MS will “win” in the long run I think because they’ll have nailed the Video-On-Demand to the living room (it’s already pretty amazing), and they’ll have the homebrew market making money for them via XNA. They may not move as many systems as the Wii, but they’ll have so many revenue streams that flow through the 360 I think they’ll make the most money this generation.
I think you are very confused and uniformed when you say “I find it hard to believe that Sony wouldn’t have out sold Nintendo if they had just had more PS3s available”. PS3’s aren’t in short supply, Wii’s are. In fact, if not for the shortage of Wii’s, nintendo would have widened the gap between them and sony. PS3’s are and have been easy to find, at least in my neck of the woods. Further, if you are going to compare the PS3 launch with the 360 launch, then that would be a good time to mention the extreme shortage of 360’s at launch (which continued well into the new year). I don’t personally know the author of this “article”, but he is obviously a sony fanboy (as evidenced by the extreme bias in the “article”)
The root of the word News is New. Please try and bring info that is more up to date and not from 3 weeks ago.
By the way, the 10 million 360’s is shipped not sold and PS3 was in supply there was just no demand for it.
Mike, here’s the direct quote from the story:
Right now, the leader in terms of units sold is Microsoft’s Xbox 360—it has sold 10.4 million units as of the end of 2006. However, the Xbox 360 was released in November, 2005, so it has had a one-year advantage over the others. It’s a solid base, so that’s why it’s the leader.
I have to disagree with you Josh. I think 360 will not lose. Neither will Wii. PS will lose a hige chunk of marketshare this time around, whether or not they come up on top eventually. If I have to make a prediction on who will sell through most units of consoles, I will pick 360.
Please do your research. The Xbox 360 sold more than the Nintendo Wii and PS3 in the U.S./North America (which is the region being reported on in this article) in 2006. Wii only comes out #1 in console sales if you are comparing strictly launch numbers from different years (2005 for Xbox 360 and 2006 for Wii and PS3).
Kind of misleading to state that Wii came out #1 in console sales when it sold less than the Xbox 360. The Wii is doing well, but getting beat by a competitor during your launch isn’t exactly something to brag about to the press. Granted, if the console was in full supply, the story may have been different. But, don’t forget that a launching console has pent up demand that should, for the most part, help the console outsell (or at least match) competitors that have had previous launches. The critical factor in this case seems to be supply.
Anyway, just something to consider. Basically, Microsoft is still extending its current (although probably not permanent against the PS3 in the long-term, but who knows) lead by keeping ahead of Nintendo and PS3 amidst their launches. That isn’t good for either Nintendo or Sony as it means that they will have to rely on making up lost ground even farther into the future.
And, quite frankly, the only way that the Wii will outpace Microsoft is to sell the Wii at ridiculously cheap prices in the future and hope that consumers don’t mind the dated graphics. Nintendo’s main advantage is that in a few years the system will = about $100 and become an impulse buy for many consumers. Otherwise, I don’t think that they can sustain market share based soley on an innovative controller. Of course, Nintendo will rake in billions of dollars even if they don’t have a huge market share because of low cost hardware.
The ultimate loser in this battle is Sony. They will probably sell the most consoles over the course of this entire console cycle (several years), but they will have lost a significant percentage of their previous lead. No matter how you spin Sony’s performance, losing market share makes them a loser relative to their previously dominant position. No self-respecting business person would consider losing a signficnat portion of the market a successful situation.
Jason Seely is correct: When Josh Goldman isn’t writing for CrunchGear, he’s a security guard (okay, security captain) at the Logata Falls, MT Best Buy. Thus: Uniformed. Next month, he gets pepper spray.
360 will win , there already winnignN when halo-3 launchers It will B tha biggest gmae launch ever , everyOnes gonna buy it everyOnes gonna get it Then tha following year we will see Gear of war 2, I Wreakon by tha end of nex YEar Gow will sell ova 7 mill , its already sold 3 mill SO yeha
360 will also hav a price drop N they hav tha best Online serice
take that cunt
I ment eod of this ear gOw will sel ova 7 lol get thaT IN2 YA U faggot nintendo cunts lol
“I don’t personally know the author of this “article”, but he is obviously a sony fanboy (as evidenced by the extreme bias in the “article”)”
WHO is the fanboy? Josh Goldman? He isn’t a fanboy… he’s merely reporting what Business Week is reporting! And trust me on this one Rainman, the staff at Business Week aren’t 20-something geeks living in their parent’s basements! They wear suits to work. They report about mutal funds, stock prices and the world of business! Sony and Microsoft are two of the biggest companies in the world. So when someone at Business Week reports that Sony is selling a product the reporter isn’t a fanboy!
What is wrong with you Wii fans? Anytime anyone reports anything about the world of business you jump in and call the reporter a fanboy. Trust me also Rainman, the reporter at Business Week probably played all of five minutes of video games last year. He’s not a gamer, Sony or otherwise. He’s a reporter.
God, are you Wii fans stupid! You think the world actually gives a fig about video games!
@FanBoy Killa
RTFA, this quote “Though this isn’t surprising, I find it hard to believe that Sony wouldn’t have out sold Nintendo if they had just had more PS3s available.” is not from the BW article, it is Josh’s opinion. This premise presumes that Wii’s were widely available and PS3’s were not, which simply is not true. It has been my observance that if anything Wii’s are much harder to find than the PS3. Thus, if the wii had been more available, it would have enjoyed an even larger gap in sales vs the PS3.
FYI: I don’t own a wii and have no intentions of buying one.
@ Matt Hickey:
Just out of curiosity, is there an official spelling police uniform?
@ Josh Goldman
Are you and the CEO of Akimbo one and the same?
Not to get in between your argument Jason and FanBoy Killa, but….
I’m not a fanboy, and actually, I really would like to get a Wii. I was just repeating what the BW article said and adding in my own opinion. Both systems were impossible to find in my area (NY, NJ, Conn), but going by everything I had read, Sony estimated they would ship 2 million units by the end of December and Nintendo had said they would ship 6 million units. That’s why I said what I said. And I still do find it hard to believe that Sony wouldn’t have sold more units than Nintendo had there been greater availability. Again, just my personal opinion.
And FanBoy Killa is right, this story is all about the business-end of things and has nothing to do with what the better platform is.
@ Jason, no I’m not that Josh Goldman, though I’ve met him a couple times now and used to get his junk mail occasionally when I worked at CNET.
Those are shipments worldwide also, so not sure if that means anything. Truthfully, I left out the most important part of the story, which was the analyst saying it’s all gonna come down to the games. That’s something most people say though, which is why I didn’t mention it.
The Xbox 360 wins.
1. Its has the best hardware for the money
2. Best established internet gaming community
3. More games
4. will support and does support many types of media via USB(hd-dvd and maybe dual format hd-dvd/blu ray. Microsoft, hint hint…
5. software updates the can brick your system. lol
Still the best system out(period) End of story.
nice wiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiii