Nintendo's Market Value Briefly Tops Sony's

GameDaily reports on news from Reuters; today for the first time Nintendo outpaced Sony's market value. Note that this isn't Sony's games wing, but the entirety of the Sony corporation. Investor confidence spurred by brisk sales of the DS and Wii pushed Nintendo (briefly) into the top ten earners in the nation of Japan, with such rarefied organizations as Honda, Toyota, and Canon. "Nintendo's shares rose to a record high 46,350 yen in the morning, increasing its overall market value to 6.57 trillion yen ($53 billion), which allowed it to surpass Sony's market capitalization for a time. The company's shares, however, finished the day a bit lower putting Nintendo back in 11th place behind Sony, but still ahead of Panasonic maker Matsushita, whose sales are over eight times larger than Nintendo's. Nintendo's market value closed at 6.39 trillion yen on Monday, just below Sony's 6.48 trillion yen."

Re:Time to short?

[DaAdder]

Games have been trickling out since most of the game producers are of the wait-and-see variety.

The Wii's success was soon evident to everyone though and most of the large game makers jumped on the bandwageon. However since games aren't produced in an instant, you'll see an avalanche of games released for the Wii, starting late '07, but mostly throughout, and towards the end of, '08.

News is surfacing that some companies are shifting focus from Sony to Nintendo entirely:
http://kotaku.com/gaming/the-tide/big-japanese-pub lishers-shift-from-sony-to-nintendo-271785.php [kotaku.com]

My guess is that this'll keep happening unless/until the PS3 somehow manages to pick it sales up significantly and reach some form of critical mass.

Re:and I remember people talking of Nintendos Demi

[MeanderingMind]

I distinctly remember people talking about Nintendo following the Sega model and refocusing only on games. These people were not necessarily informed, but discussion did happen on a semi-regular basis across interested forums. I believe it peaked around the PSP's launch.

At the time the DS was moving slowly, and the PSP's launch was impressive. The "Revolution" was a long ways off, and its features pure speculation. Given they were last in the console market (by market share) and the PSP looked set to steal the handheld market at that time, threads hailing or lamenting the demise of Nintendo as a hardware company were not uncommon. Despite the Gamecube making pure profit, it was hard to imagine that Nintendo could continue making consoles if their market kept shrinking.

People also talked about the Xbox "vastly" outselling the Gamecube. Why? Fanboys of the time would cite specific regions, months, etc. to slant the facts. Just because it was wrong doesn't mean it wasn't spoken.

As a last note, the Gamecube and N64 profits were significant even if they may have been less than the Gameboy Advance (I'm not going to commit either way without numbers). Assuming a mere $1 profit was made on each console sold, that's $50 million in hardware sales. That's distributed over 10 years, but we're making about the harshest assumption possible about systems that were never sold at loss during their time; We're also ignoring software sales, accessories and licensing fees.

Re:Wiimorse? I don't think so. Wii wins hands down

[MorpheousMarty]

I agree, that is why I have a Wii and a PC. When I want to game, and not waste my life tuning settings, I play Wii. When I want the best graphics possible I use my PC. The Xbox and the PS3 both feel like PC's I'm not allowed to tune to my liking, and for that I would only buy them if they had some GREAT games for them, which eventually they will, but as you said, nothing is grabbing me now so I play Resident Evil 4 on the Wii and am more pleased with it than everything but God of War II.