Wii Is the New US Console Leader 397
stoolpigeon writes with this snippet from an AFP story carried by Google: "Nintendo said Thursday that its globally popular Wii has become the top-selling video game console in the United States, a crown coveted by rivals Microsoft and Sony. Market-tracking firm NPD Group reports that 666,000 Wii consoles were sold in the United States in June, raising the total sales count in the country to nearly 10.9 million units." I'd rather play board games than video games, but the Wii Fit makes one of these tempting anyhow.
more numbers (Score:5, Informative)
Re:But the games! (Score:5, Informative)
I haven't played the Wii's iteration of Mario Kart, which I probably should rent, but I have a feeling it's not much better (although, feel free to enlighten me on this).
The online play with Mario Kart (at least for me, over wireless attached to a cable modem) is worlds better than SSBB. Almost lag-free, doesn't take 10 minutes to find enough people for a match, etc.
Re:But the games! (Score:1, Informative)
Re: Mario Kart's online capabilities: I own both Smash Brothers Brawl and Mario Kart, and let me assure you Mario Kart's online play is much more stable. I can rarely finish a game of Smash Brothers online before getting dropped (so much so, that I've stopped trying), whereas Mario Kart only drops out maybe once every two weeks ~10 hours of play per week (both Regional and Worldwide). And even if it does drop, the barrier to re-entry is low; i.e., back up and competing in no time.
Comment removed (Score:5, Informative)
Re:But the games! (Score:4, Informative)
If online gaming is essential to you then that's why you don't see any games worth playing. There's no question that the Wii needs to pick up the game in the online arena to attract that crowd although the 360's latest offerings seem to take a bit from both the Wii and the PS3.
To name a few worthy games IMO:
Of course it's a matter of opinion, but there are at least ten solid titles IMO. I own all three systems and I find myself gaming on my PC & DS more than all three combined. The PS3 library is sparse. Most 360 games offer a similar feel and Live isn't that interesting for me.
Re:I dont have one yet... (Score:5, Informative)
Or use the Wii Tracker [wiitracker.com]. It checks several stores online. In about a week of using the RSS feed, I found a bundle containing games that I wanted, some extra controllers that I would've wanted anyway, and didn't have any junk in it that I didn't want. You can probably find just the console, but I only saw one while watching the tracker and it sold out quickly.
Re:more numbers (Score:1, Informative)
You mean like FFXIII being released on the Xbox 360, the addition of Netflix for streaming movies, Rock Band 2, Gears of War 2, Fallout 3, Portal Still Alive, Resident Evil 5, Fable 2, dashboard and Live enhancements?
With the exception of FFXIII and a later Rock Band 2 release, none of that's coming to the PS3.
And what does Sony have? They're replacing the existing 80GB model with a new version that doesn't support PS2 games and doesn't come with a game. (Plus it loses two USB ports and all the media card slots.) So remember how it used to be you could tell the PS3s apart by HD size and nothing else? That's going away this fall.
And that's it. Home still isn't even in beta.
Microsoft isn't even slightly worried about Sony. They're worried sick about Nintendo, though - and this story shows why.
Re:So long, "hardware gamers" (Score:4, Informative)
Re:So long, "hardware gamers" (Score:5, Informative)
And the DS? According to wikipedia:
"As of March 31, 2008, sales of the DS Lite have reached 51.78 million units worldwide."
As a PC Gamer who dabbles in console gaming, I'm not afraid to admit that console gaming is bigger. But I also know that the mouse/keyboard is the best way to control FPS and RTS games, so I'm not afraid of PC Gaming dying any time soon.
Re:But the games! (Score:2, Informative)
Re:But the games! (Score:2, Informative)
Every month or so you can play special tournaments like pushing enemies from a platform or collecting all the coins from a stage as fast as you can. You can then upload your time and see how you stand against the rest of the world, your region or your friends.
You can also download ghost to race against. Like, for instance, the one with the world record time of a track like I did just to make a fool of myself.
Re:Lifecycle? (Score:1, Informative)
Resident Evil 4 is a first-person shooter. If it's a shooter-on-rails, it's most likely actually this one:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Resident_Evil:_The_Umbrella_Chronicles
Which I've been meaning to pick up for ages. If only I had more free time...
Re:I dont have one yet... (Score:1, Informative)
or even easier. Know someone in the receiving department of a store. If it doesn't hit the floor of the store before you can get it, no one else can buy it before you.
That's how I got mine, and one for my girl friend's nephew.
Re:but not all of us (Score:5, Informative)
Yes, I am sure they do have people doing capacity planning. I am sure that time to market became a consideration so they did not want sit a stack a warchest of them in their warehouse, not to mention the risk had they not been big sellars, they know like all products in the electronics market demand will taper off no matter what they do in the end. Which would mean that not building out a lot more manufacturing facility might be wise, even if it means you can't sell as many units, because what will you do with it after the popularity fades?
Nintendo started off stockpiling a warehouse full of Wiis; they had a ridiculously successful launch in terms of consoles available on day 1. When even that wasn't enough to fill the demand, they increased their manufacturing capacity by 50%. This is not a simple thing to do, either, and constitutes risk like you say. Even still, wiis are hard to find.
It's time for people like the OP to wake up. Nintendo is not creating an artificial shortage. Nintendo is making and selling wiis as fast as it can; they have no reason not to unless you imagine Big N has a magical machine that can turn hype into money without having anything to sell. Whether you want to admit it or not, the answer is simple: The reason wiis are hard to find is because they really are selling that well. With numbers like the ones in the article, any other explanation sounds really, really stupid.
They are selling the units they can produce where the currency offers them the best excahnge rate so they take the most profit. Why they don't raise prices since the market will obviously bare it, I don't know, Good Will?
Well half the value proposition for the Wii is that it's cheap. Nintendo has always wanted their systems to be affordable, and isn't going to throw away that strategy/reputation any time soon. Especially in this generation -- half the strategy of getting the "casual gamer" aka the non-gamer to buy the Wii is the price, to make it seem worth taking a chance on. Far fewer people would want one if it cost more, so keeping the price low is their way of keeping demand high. That's my take anyway.
Note that this also shows how stupid the 'artificial shortage' theory is. Why would they create an artificial shortage, and then not charge more, resulting in them making less money over time?
AND! (Score:4, Informative)
There is a Wii emulator out already. I submitted a story last week, but as usual....
http://www.dolphin-emu.com/ [dolphin-emu.com]
Re:So long, "hardware gamers" (Score:3, Informative)
I've been considering selling the Wii, actually.
Re:you are satan (Score:1, Informative)
Re:So long, "hardware gamers" (Score:4, Informative)
Bit more info:
PS2: 300MHz MIPS CPU, no L2 cache but there's 16K of on-chip "scratch RAM" that's used to get around that limitation. 32 MB of RAM, though 1 MB is reserved for Sony's micro-kernel (or whatever). Two independent vector units. One is attached to the CPU and can either run independently or it acts as a SIMD unit for the CPU. It's actually semi-useless as an independent unit due to restrictions on how you can DMA out of it, but some developers find a good use for it. The second unit is attached to the rasterizer and is the programmable transform unit. There's an entire PS1 console in there. You can use it's CPU and everything if you like. Usually it just handles I/O (since the controllers and memory cards are physically attached to it and the actual PS2 just DMA's in/out of its memory to get data). Fixed function texturing and lighting with semi-broken blend modes. Vast amounts of fill rate. God's own DMA controller. Direct access to every memory address and register in the box (though a few are off limits).
Wii: 729 MHz PowerPC with 256K L2 cache and SIMD extensions; 88MB of stupidly fast (or so goes my understanding - I base that on my colleagues' assertions) RAM; fixed function transform unit; up to 8 textures per pass (1 texture per clock) with programmable blending. No idea what the API is like. My best guess is it's direct access to the hardware like the PS2.
360: Three PowerPC CPUs running at 3.2 GHz with two hardware threads each. Effective clock rate is lower since cache-misses are obscenely expensive. One SIMD vector unit per CPU. 1 MB L2 cache on each CPU. 512 MB unified memory. Blazing fast GPU with lots of fill rate, but there are restrictions on the frame buffer (as it is held in special uber-fast on-chip RAM in the GPU). Fully programmable transformation (with the ability to pull and push data to arbitrary memory locations). Fully programmable texturing and shading. Fixed-function blending. Mini OS is always running in the background. All drawing done through D3D9-like API. Dashboard can hijack your frame buffer or input (or anything, really) any time it likes to do fancy XBOX stuff.
So yeah, completely dissimilar.
Yup.
Re:So long, "hardware gamers" (Score:1, Informative)
Actualy the 8 texture limitation isn't quite as simple as that, it's possible to do upto 20 texture lookups in a single pass. You can only reference 8 textures and 8 sets of generated texture coordinates, but in each of the 16 texture stages (plus 4 indirect texture stages) you can lookup any of the 8 textures with any of the texture co-ordinates.
Since many texture looks can reuse the same tex cords (Such as a normal map and diffuse maps), and there is nothing to stop you creating larger (non tiling) textures that combine multiple source textures you can achieve effects equivalent to much more than the basic 8 lookups.
Re:Sue the maker for anti-competitive practices (Score:2, Informative)
I wasn't explicitly, but in the UK, it sells for the equivalent of $360 and in France it sells for the equivalent of more than $300(I used Amazon.uk for the UK but I can't find a good price for the Euro zone), both of which more than account for a 17% tax.
Re:Sue the maker for anti-competitive practices (Score:2, Informative)
I can tell you that (AFAIK) here in Portugal we never had any shortage of Wiis, ever since it was launched. Everytime I go to a game store there's always a mountain of them.