Consolation
Since Bill Harris linked me, I’ll link him..his console posts are always insightful, without the Pachter-esque Wall Street Crap.
Bill always makes some very good points, and the new NPD numbers back up his arguments. The Xbox 360 needs to jump start console sales. Ninja Gaiden 2 isn’t going to do it. It’s amazing that with a 12 month headstart the Wii has overtaken the 360…but, what is the attach rate? I mean every Wii game is basically a controller pack in. Wii Play tops the charts — but would Xbox 360 additional controller with generic game also top the charts? I do have quite a few Wii games, but the 360 is my personal console of choice due to the ease of downloadable content and online gaming. However, if 360 is going to have the legs of the PS2 (which only sold 30,000 less then the 360..WTF?, they’ve got to move on the prices. This temporary price decrease is crap.
It will be very interesting to see what happens. Until then, we can all enjoy the games regardless of platform, unless it’s MGS 4, which is as much of a 10 as an EA Sports game.
July 18th, 2008 at 7:29 am
Yes, Wii Play is a pack in with a remote, but when you look at the numbers that Nintendo released recently on game play time (you had to agree to send your usage numbers to Nintendo in order to get the Nintendo channel as a free download) you’ll see that Wii Play gets played. A lot. Now, I don’t know if this is a situation where people are buying the game because it comes with a remote and then finding out that it’s actually a pretty good game but I can tell you that I’ve gotten a bunch of free XBLA games from MSFT over the years with the various Live packs and I never, ever play them, nor would I recommend them. If people buy Wii Play for the remote and then enjoy the game, they’ll probably recommend it to other Wii owners. After all if the game is shitty, why spend the extra 10 bucks over the cost of the remote?
July 18th, 2008 at 8:47 am
My whole thing with attach rates is this…
What do they really want? More consoles or more games? More consoles = more games in the long run, so when all you can say right now is that you’re selling 2 or 3 more games per system than the other guys, that’s a small consolation.
Just for arguments sake…say they have an attach rate of 6:1 worldwide right now, according to the latest VG Chartz that would mean about 120 million games sold.
Say Nintendo has a 4:1 worldwide attach rate, that would mean 120 million in software sales as well, due to the fact that they’ve sold 10 million more consoles world wide.
They’re just spinning the only good news they have, but the fact of the matter is that they’re losing market share rapidly and they’re not selling nearly as many new consoles at this stage as they should have been.
They do have a great platform and, when the hardware works, it’s a great system… but they’re losing the battle right now to both Nintendo and Sony and unless they’re content to make the amount of money that they are in their entertainment division, they need to do something else to drive hardware sales… a price cut would be a step in the right direction… but I’m guessing we’re not going to see that.
When you’re being outsold by a more expensive console, as well as a cheaper console, it would certainly seem like you’re doing something wrong.
I think E3 was an indication of that. They’re spending 10 minutes talking about that silly movies game, but they delayed a Halo game announcement. What?!?!
They seem to be so confused about which market that they’re going after that they aren’t focusing on the market that sold their consoles in the first place.