Wii, DS, Not Cannibals 98
Nintendo President Iwata, GameSpot reports, has stated that the Wii and the DS are not 'eating' each other. That is to say, the Wii's brisk sales reports have not harmed the high demand for Nintendo's portable system. From the article: "'Some analysts say the largest rival of the Wii is the DS,' he told the Reuters news service. 'But if you take a look at DS sales in the United States in the Thanksgiving week or DS sales in Japan in the week of the Wii launch, there has been little impact.' By the end of its fiscal year on March 31, 2007, Nintendo now believes it will have sold 6 million Wiis and 20 million combined units of the DS and DS Lite. It currently predicts its annual profit will total 145 billion yen (around $1.26 billion), an increase of more than 60 percent, with annual sales rising 45 percent to 740 billion yen (approximately $6.44 billion). "
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Duh
2 million is more than 1 million, so of course it's better to sell 2 million units.
But whether you sell 2 million Wii's and 0 DS's, or 2 million DS's and 0 Wii's is still important due to manufacturing costs. Consoles are generally sold at a loss when they are first released. I believe Nintendo actually makes money on DS sells. Plus there is the whol
Re:Nintendo (Score:4, Informative)
You mean OTHER consoles are generally sold at a loss. Nintendo does not operate this way. They make money or they don't sell it.
Those wacky japanese businessmen.
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As opposed to.... Sony?
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Thanks to all 3 of you who pointed this out. I wasn't aware of this fact.
I know Nintendo doesn't make huge financial gambles like Microsoft and Sony does, but I just assumed their consoles were sold at a loss (at least a small loss) when they were new. I know manufacturing costs go down over time. I remember reading about how Microsoft calculated that into their Xbox sells. The
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Now, to be totally, horribly pedantic about it, at one time the GC was sold for a loss. When Nintendo first reduced the price to $99, they were selling it at a loss for about a month before cost reductio
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It has been stated several places (http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20060915-77
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And if you had read the posts by the three people who pointed this out before you...
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The batteries lasted forever, but yeah, whatever ...
Batteries (Score:5, Insightful)
If the batteries are dead, then it doesn't matter how awesome your graphics are, how l33t your processor is, or even how good your games are: your system is an expensive brick. It seems like such a small thing, but poor battery life can bring even the greatest system to its knees. None of Nintendo's competitors seem to have understood this, and in the end they've all suffered for it.
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I still can't believe how long I get out of a charge of the GBA:SP, though. I can play during lunch at work and before class at night for a whole week without the low warning
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4 (non-game) Reasons Nintendo rules portables... (Score:5, Informative)
I know that's supposed to be sarcasm, but The original Gameboy took 4, and lasted 10 hours or better. The best any competitor could manage was 6 hours. Nintendo had 4 basic rules about making the Handheld the other handhelds didn't get. Obviously the Games are the reason to buy it, but from an Engineering standpoint Nintendo's handhelds have always had 4 things going for it:
1) Make it portable. - Atari Lynx had a commercial showing a child pulling it out of a backpack. Why? Because he needed to. A portable needs to fit inside a coat pocket so it's always accessable.
2) Make it affordable. - Every Handheld system pre-DS sold for $99.99 USD or less. Nintendo is in the business of selling games, not systems. Keep the system price low, so more people can buy your games.
3) Make it last a day. - A reasonable amount of Battery Life is required or Customers get angry. The Sweet spot is at 10 hours or more.
4) Make it durable. - Handhelds suffer more, and accidents happen. Their systems have been outright abused and they still work. There is actually an original GameBoy on display at Nintendo World in NYC that was in the Gulf War. It's half melted (Including searing the cartridge to the unit) but still will play Tetris. As long as a customer has a working system they can buy, and play your games.
Re:4 (non-game) Reasons Nintendo rules portables.. (Score:2)
I will vouch for this. It is awsome to see it. The system is horribly messed up during a bombing of the baracks it wa
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Re:Nintendo (Score:5, Interesting)
The rest of your point is of course accurate, but it also wasn't "just" games. The GameGear, for example, was something that people said "oh, it's so superior to the gameboy; it has color, a backlit screen, more powerful hardware, etc.". But the GameGear also had terrible battery life, and the screen quality wasn't all that great and tended to have a lot of problems with ghosting and appearing washed out. I never did play a TurboGrafix Express or Atari Lynx, but I recall hearing they also had similar issues. And of course, the GameBoy's huge game library helped a lot too.
Nintendo has been criticized to some degree for being "behind the times" with the GameBoy/GBC/GBA/DS/etc. compared to its competition, and certainly from a pure technical point, there have often been more superior devices out there. But I think Nintendo has generally had a tendency to wait until they can really perfect something before they put it out there. So, for example, the original GBA launched without backlighting, but the GBA SP finally did add it in, and pretty well (and Nintendo has continued to make improvements to backlighting quality) and without the huge sacrifice in battery life.
I think the current "battle" between the DS and PSP also highlights another, newer factor in this competition. The approach of the PSP really seems to be, for the most part, to offer a true "portable" PlayStation experience, with the main selling point being that you can play the exact same kinds of games as you would on your console at home.
But what has really been shown here is that, to some degree, the games people want to play on a console at home aren't always the games they want to play on a handheld. I think Nintendo has a really good grasp on what a lot of people actually use a handheld gaming device for.
You often hear people now say that the PSP's problem is "no good games", but I don't think this is necessarily it. I own both a DS and PSP, and actually have a fair number of games for both. And they actually have been putting out some really nice PSP games, and lately I've been enjoying Syphon Filter Dark Mirror and Valkyrie Profile: Lenneth and even Tekken: Dark Resurrection. But the thing is, I play these games at home most of the time, and I treat them more like "console games". I don't carry my PSP around with me and play them for a few minutes or something like that while I'm waiting for something. So I don't think it's that the PSP doesn't have "good games"; it has some great games. It's just that it has a lot of games that aren't necessarily well suited for "on the go" gaming.
To be fair, there are also DS games I use like that too........ Advance Wars, for example, isn't a game I normally just play "on the go". But I think this is the fundamental issue with the PSP right now.
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GameGear Screen (Score:2)
I own all the three systems - a Lynx, an original GB and a GameGear. All in all, the GameGear's screen is the worst, and the Lynx's is the best. The GameGear has an incredibly "laggy" screen - faster games like Sonic are virtually unplayable. The GB is at least playable. The Lynx got it right - color *and* a pretty responsive screen. Even fast plays look pretty good.
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That may be true. There were very few "fast" GB games, and the ones that seemed fast usually only pretended to be fast - the F1 racing game, for example.
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Re:Nintendo (Score:2)
Doesn't the sleep function make a difference in that? There's no need to worry about having to save or lose progress when you can just sleep the thing.
I carry mine around, it's easier in cooler weather
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Again, this is true for me with some DS games too. It's not really a knock on either of these systems, just wh
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Anyone have reliable attach rate numbers for the DS and PSP? I reckon the DS's is higher, but that's probably on account of my fanboyism.
Anyway, in my opinion the PSP really has a lot less going for it in terms of games and cost and such compared to... anything. IMO the fact that it has so many sales is a testament to the selling power of the Playstation brand name. (That or b
Re:Nintendo (Score:4, Interesting)
Looking at current retail sales reports paints a much grimmer picture for Sony, though. The latest figures that have been released have DS & DS Lite sales outpacing PSP 2:1 in the American and European markets and 5:1 in the Japanese market.
Even just looking at the article you quoted, notice that the sames of the GBA, Nintendo's last generation system, are higher than the PSP. Not a particularly good trend.
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Current sales figures out of Japan are even more tilted. Latest week I could find there were 201,378 DS Lites sold and only
2526 GBAs of any flavour (including SP and Micro).
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I don't know about that. I had a GameBoy and later on I got a Sega gamegear. I thought the Sega would be so much better because it had a color screen and better graphics. But the hardware just wasn't good enough at the time. I remember playing Sonic on my gamegear and it was just a perpetual blur of colors. The LCD didn't update fast enough. When you were standing still, it look
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This is like saying the biggest rival to Ford is (Score:4, Insightful)
The only person that the DS and the Wii competes over is the guy who is only going to buy 1 system or handheld. And in the past the DS was competing with the PSP for that anyways (and winning for the most part).
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Re:This is like saying the biggest rival to Ford i (Score:1, Offtopic)
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Do these look like crotch rockets? I'd buy a harley if I wanted an overpriced motorcycle...or I'd look elsewhere if I wasn't bleeding money from my anus.
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Let me guess: You're a hardware geek who likes to fix broken computers and bikes :-)
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Yamaha motorcycles have been in my family since at least the late 70's and they haven't been problematic much at all.
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It's either Piaggio or BMW.
And BMWs most fierce competition could easily be BMW ( they do produce both quality cars and quality motorcycles
Yes they are, at least the DS is... (Score:1, Offtopic)
Course, that could be because the polar white was bought from me, but I prefer to think of the the cannibalism aspect. One DS munching on another is kinda funny...
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Oh well, I think we should start by teaching some mods the difference between "troll" and "bad humor". Overrated? Sure! Troll? WTF!?
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I think we'd be better off inventing a <sarcasm> tag.
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Duh? (Score:5, Insightful)
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Because "some analysts" are apparently retarded.
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Can work together (Score:2)
Not to mention that they have the potential of working together. They both support Wi-Fi and I believe Nintendo was planning to have some games which got both working together.
Because... (Score:2)
Nintendo isn't so much informing us as framing the debate. They're basically saying "the DS is so successfull that only the Wii could possibly be a threat."
quite the pickle (Score:2)
I wish I had these kinda problems!
English Got Cannibalized... (Score:3, Funny)
Wii And DS Are Not Cannibals
(But they should be eating Microsoft and Sony's lunch!)
Re:English Got Cannibalized... (Score:5, Insightful)
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Country Time is owned by Dr Pepper/7UP who is in turn owned by Cadbury Schweppes. It's always hard to tell if a product is Cadbury Schweppes since they don't bottles their own beverages. Sometimes a Coca-Cola bottler will bottle them, sometimes a Pepsi bottler, and sometimes someone else entirely will bottle them based on the area. The nearest Pepsi equivalent wo
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In fact, they're not just both product, but video game systems. The only difference is that one is hand-held, and the other is not.
Re:English Got Cannibalized... (Score:5, Funny)
I think the metaphor works rather well. You just have to consider them seperate genders. The Wii being male because it's larger... and called Wii. And the DS being female because it's smaller, you can take it places, and it's fun to poke, not to mention it has a pair of things to stare at.
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I mentioned this on another site (Score:4, Insightful)
Maybe it's just early... (Score:2, Funny)
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If my family is any example... (Score:2)
My brother, on the other hand, is an avoid sports fan and is likely to stick with Sony regardless of anything else, as long as he can actually GET one, because he's addicted to his football. He wants a PS3, but because
So... (Score:3, Insightful)
Meanwhile MS and Sony are trying to keep from digging themselves too big a hole with their video game divisions.
Who is the real "winner."
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I don't think Sony is doing that bad. The PS2 and games for it are selling really well. MS, well, the 360 is poised to get some JRPGs which might allow it to hit the 10 million mark which is a good number to encourage third party development. So right now, everyone is winning, just to different degrees.
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The longer term is more questionable, and harder to make simple statements about.
I see that you are a short term sort of person, living for the moment, no savings account or pension for you. Good luck with that.
Sony clearly has a long term strategy, the PS3 is probably so powerful that it could have been released in a couple of years and still be out in front graphically. And it would be a lot cheaper. It seems that this is when Sony are
Sure the DS is selling well! (Score:2, Funny)
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Hey!
I didn't make you come with me. ;)
... I didn't make you leave home Mario Kart, Tetris DS, and Animal Crossing, either. What were you thinking? :P
Not Cannabis? (Score:1)
One leads to the other (Score:2)
not what? (Score:2)
Cannabis?? (Score:1)