In case you haven’t checked, Grand Theft Auto IV has taken the top two ranks away from Ocarina of Time, and Super Mario Galaxy on Gameranking’s master list. GTA IV has nabbed near perfect reviews for its open-ended sandbox gameplay, and violently mature storytelling. GTA…blah!
The game industry is, undeniably, already well on its way into a new era. It is, like a certain presidential candidate, change we can believe in. It is both an exciting time (as a player) and an uncertain time (as a developer). But it is also a highly lucrative time, as is usually the case when truly disruptive trends begin to come to a head (see also, iPod).
Hardware and software sales continue to trend well into the billions of dollars; industry figureheads like former Sony exec Phil Harrison have allegedly stepped down because of blowback against some of the newer game ideas that are making money where there wasn’t any to be made in the past; and, since I would be remiss to not include it in a post on a fansite devoted to passionate discussion about its very being, there is, without question, Nintendo. (more…)
Thanks to the one-two punch of titles like Super Smash Bros. Brawl and the quirky Wii Fit balance board, Nintendo has widened its lead in Japan over Sony’s PlayStation 3.
According to an article from Reuters today, Nintendo’s Wii game console outsold the PlayStation 3 nearly 4-to-1 in Japan in February despite Sony’s console beginning to narrow the gap last autumn. In addition to strong hardware sales, Wii software titles also dominated the best seller list. Super Smash Bros. Brawl led the software sales with 1.33 million units, followed by Wii Fit which sold 309,311 units in the four weeks.
According to Reuters, Enterbrain and the Japanese gaming mag Famistsu, the Wii’s lead on the PS3 appears to be widening. In February it was 4:1; in January, the Wii outsold the PS3 by almost 3-to-1. Nintendo sold 331,627 units of the Wii in the four weeks to Feb. 24, compared with 89,131 units of the PS3, market research firm Enterbrain said.
Microsoft, content to sell to that lucrative “niche collector’s market” in Japan, sold 14,079 Xbox 360 units in the February reporting period.
I never in a million years thought I’d be caught dead saying this, but thank you Phil Harrison, thank you.
Why the love? Because last week at the Game Developer’s Conference the outgoing Sony video game chief said that controllers for the PS3 and the Xbox 360 were too confusing for a majority of people in the world today. “You hand somebody a game controller and it’s like you’ve handed them a live gun or a hand grenade with the pin taken out,” he said.
Then Harrison, perhaps emboldened by his recent decision to abandon ship at Sony and swim towards the sinking ship that is Atari (Infogrames), applauded the Wiimote and the Apple iPhone for their ease-of-use.
GameIndustry.biz reports that Harrison praised Nintendo’s Wiimote for being a “non-game centric device” which has democratized video game controls. He was also impressed with the iPhone for appealing to a user’s natural instincts. No, not making babies — touching things! (which, in hindsight, can also lead to making babies, but I digress…)
“I saw this first hand a few weeks ago where a two year old was playing with an iPhone and he knows how to get the pictures up of mum and dad. The two year-old then intuitively thought that all electronic devices worked like that,” said Harrison. “He’s pressing the TV to change channels. He’s right and the rest of us are wrong – that should be applied universally. Apple should be applauded for that innovation.”
So, if you remember nothing else today, remember these wise words — The Wii: building one video game democracy at a time. The iPhone: makes babies.
Factor 5 president Julian Eggebrecht sent Nintendo fans reeling in January when he announced his prestigious team has “at least one all-new Wii project” in development.
In an interview earlier this month with IGN’s Matt Casamassina at the annual DICE Summit in Las Vegas, Eggebrecht revealed a few more vague details and confirmed widely held expectations that Factor 5 would push the modest Wii hardware to unprecedented new levels.
What wasn’t expected, however, was the extent to which the Lair developer has pushed Nintendo’s comparatively under-powered platform. According to Eggebrecht, Factor 5 has created an engine for Wii software that “does everything the PS3 did and then some.”
The idea has been bandied about, dissected, contested and now it appears as though it will finally come to fruition: the DS, that plucky little multicolored portable, is set to overtake the PS2 in Japan sometime in early 2008.
For some, this milestone was a given, especially in light of the portable’s insane sales numbers thoughout late 2006 and all of 2007. According to an article at GameIndustry.biz, the hard facts are thus:
For the week ending December 2 the DS sold 124,627 units, up from 116,694 the previous week, while the Wii shifted 74,764, up from 54,362 in the week before. That brings the lifetime sales figure for the handheld console to 20,284,183 - at which rate it will overtake the PlayStation 2’s lifetime figure in the middle of January next year.
During this period, the two Nintendo consoles were the only ones to see an increase in the number of units sold.
Full Japanese hardware list below… (more…)
When you’ve built your entire business around grandiose, movie-like fantasy titles with huge, in-depth cutscenes, what do you do when a graphically inferior console is currently eating up the entire video game industry?
Did you say lash out? Complain? How about whine and moan? If so, you’re correct, and Yoichi Wada, CEO of Square Enix, deserves a prize.
On Wednesday, Yoichi told CNET that the current trend today is most people aren’t buying the Wii as a game machine, but as a toy. “The Wii is the antithesis of the Xbox 360,” he said. “Xbox 360 is strictly for hardcore gamers. The attachment rate for the Xbox 360 is much higher than for the Wii. People who buy the 360 really like games.” On the Sony side of things, Wada said the company needs to position the PS3 as a game machine instead of a supercomputer. Hmm. That sounds oddly familiar (and a little side note and hat tip to Malstrom, this also resembles when the NES appeared on the PC-dominated gaming scene of the 1980s). (more…)
Analyst Michael Pachter, Mr. Video Game guru himself, has cast down the tea leaves into his voodoo pot of stray animal bones and sees incredible October sales numbers not only for Nintendo, but for video games in general.
Most of the sales growth was driven by Activision’s Guitar Hero III, which accounted for USD 100 million in sales. Pachter’s estimate reflects USD 425 in sales from new platforms and USD 130 million in sales from current generation software sales.
Once again, in his estimate, the Wii will lead the market in hardware sales. He estimates sell-through of 450,000 Wii consoles, 325,000 Xbox 360 consoles, and 125,000 PlayStation 3 consoles.
And worry not about a weakening U.S. economy, dear readers, for Master Pachter predicts that solid software sales will continue well into 2008. No kidding, Pach, I could have told you that.
El Segundo, Calif., Oct. 30, 2007—Nintendo displaced Sony Corp. as the leader in the video-game console software market in the third quarter of 2007 as it introduced a flood of new titles for both its Wii video-game console and its portable DS system, according to iSuppli Corp. Worldwide revenue for Nintendo DS and Wii gaming software amounted to $1.2 billion in the third quarter, up 31.4 percent from $943.6 million in the second quarter and more than double the $611 million from the third quarter of 2006.
In comparison, Sony Corp. in the third quarter generated $1 billion in gaming software revenue for its PlayStation 3, PlayStation 2 and PSP players. Microsoft Corp. posted revenue of $317.8 million for Xbox and Xbox 360 software. In the second quarter, Sony generated $1 billion in gaming software revenue for its gaming platforms, while Microsoft was at $271.9 million.
I think I just added Spore creator Wii Wright to my Christmas shopping list. In an interview with Guardian Unlimited Wright, who also created the Sims, called the Wii the only true next-generation console out of the three new console platforms on the market.
Of course some of us already subscribe to this belief, but to hear someone of Wright’s caliber put it so succinctly might win over a few more:
“Somebody asked me what I thought next generation meant and what about the PlayStation 3 was next generation. The only next gen system I’ve seen is the Wii - the PS3 and the Xbox 360 feel like better versions of the last, but pretty much the same game with incremental improvement”, Wright told Guardian Unlimited. Wii, Wright continued, feels like a major jump, “not that the graphics are more powerful, but that it hits a completely different demographic.” (more…)
It’s a sign of the times: a big name publisher/developer moves an incredibly successful game from a failing environment to one with both proven promise and latent potential, all because of spiraling out of control production costs.
Today, it’s CAPCOM and a signature franchise in Monster Hunter (4.5 million sold to date). The game will be a Wii exclusive when it launches sometime next year, according to early reports out of the now Internet famous Nintendo press conference of 2007 and an article at Forbes.com. On the other side of the spectrum, the PS3 version has reportedly been canceled, and I will say no more on that point.
This might not be as big of a coup as Dragon Quest going to the DS, but it’s close. Will every game ever made from here on out be switched to the Wii? Never, that’s not what I’m hinting at in the slightest. There are some games that work, and some that don’t. In this case, one of the most popular games of the moment is one of the games that works.
According to the analysts at U.K.-based Screen Digest, Nintendo’s current success with the Wii means great things for the company during the important holiday quarter, and further realignment towards the Wii at the publisher level is set to continue as it has throughout 2007.
86 titles are scheduled for release on the Wii in Q4, compared with 47 for Microsoft’s Xbox 360 and just 38 for the PS3. Furthermore, a quarter of the Wii releases are exclusive to the platform, compared with eight for the Xbox 360 and five for PS3. Screen Digest sees Nintendo’s success and external support for Wii only accelerating, primarily thanks to the quickly growing installed base and lower cost of development on the platform. The firm “expects that the number of games available for Wii will surpass Xbox 360’s library in early 2008 at current release rates.”
Hardly a surprise, I know, but it does give some finality to it all as we approach the holiday. Eighty-six titles in Q4? A quarter of those are exclusives? Are we sure this is a Nintendo system? A lot of those titles will be junk, but as Blake has pointed out here at Infendo before, that’s the exact same dynamic that exists for the PS2. More games equals more crap, but it also means more great games too.
In line with Blake’s Wired “do it in a sentence” post from earlier this morning, I though I’d throw up a series of three interviews over at Gamasutra that are an impromptu progress report for each of the three consoles on the market today.
That’s pretty much it on that. No extra commentary or snark or insults.
OK, ok. One insult. Michael Pachter is an attention whore.
The October ‘07 issue of Wired magazine features a nifty geek encyclopedia that defines several geek related terms in A-Z fashion. Here’s how the index defined seventh-generation game consoles in a nutshell:
Wii. A motion-sensing controller, simple games, and a low price make this the top 7th-genner.
Xbox 360. Brilliantly conceived online-community features give this box sizzle.
PS3. Stellar specs can’t make up for the high price and late release — a missed opportunity.
How fitting are the descriptions?
Here’s an random theory to bounce around your brains: Nintendo was relieved to see 360 and PS3 games come out at $60 a pop because it meant they could continue to charge $50 for their console’s titles.
What I’m getting at is whether or not Wii games would be worth $50 if software for 360 and PS3 cost the same amount. Share your thoughts about this random theory in comments!
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