24 hours after it was revealed that Nintendo was making record profits in Australia comes news that the little Japanese Wii games console is storming out of retailers.
The Nintendo Wii video game console has continued its remarkable performance in April, with sales that far outpaced its next-gen rivals, Microsoft’s Xbox 360 and Sony’s PlayStation 3. According to figures compiled by NPD Group, the Wii sold 360,000 units in the USA alone in April compared to 174,000 Xbox 360s and just 82,000 PlayStation 3s.
According to David Riley, a Senior Manager at NPD Group, that puts the Wii’s total sales since its release at 2.5 million units, a little less than half of the Xbox 360’s 5.4 million total units sold, and roughly twice the PlayStation 3’s 1.3 million. All sales figures are for the U.S. alone.
But the big problem for Sony and Microsoft is that Nintendo is not bleeding billions in costs. In fact it is profitable and growing.
Riley said that it’s not easy to summarize why the Wii is performing so well. “There are a lot of reasons,” he said. “Nintendo has done great marketing for the [console], and after a slow start, has gotten great PR from the media. The [Wii] is remarkably easy to use, and of course, the price point helps as well.”
Mass-Market Appeal
“The price points for the PlayStation 3 and the Xbox 360 are a killer when it comes to attracting the masses,” Riley suggested. “They’re not unattractive to the hard-core gamers, but they’re simply not mass-market prices.”
With a bewildering array of technological choices out there, Riley said, a lot of consumers find the complexity of the Xbox 360 and the PlayStation 3 to be intimidating.
“The very fact that the Wii doesn’t use a lot of cutting-edge technology — apart from the controller, of course — gives it an edge,” he said. “You can really start using the [Wii] without looking at the manual, and when you do need to read the manual, it’s actually quite understandable.”
Sustainable Lead?
Of particular interest to analysts (and the console manufacturers, of course) is whether the Wii’s impressive performance is sustainable. The chief question will be whether players will continue to be captivated by the Wii’s motion-based controls as game manufacturers start taking advantage of the other units’ greater processing power.
Riley cautioned that the remarkable sales figures for the Wii only represent the first six months of sales, so it is not clear how it will perform in the long run. However, he said he thinks that the system will continue to be a hit with consumers.
“The Wii’s ability to maintain its incredible sales performance is the topic du jour in the blogosphere,” Riley said, “but I think it will continue to do well. Nintendo’s got a great line of titles coming out for the system, and excellent hardware. But the company’s biggest advantage is that it is attracting an audience that neither Microsoft nor Sony can attract. Nintendo just needs to keep coming out with titles that appeal to these nontraditional gamers.”
