January Game Sales Explode, Wii Dominates

njkid1, as he does from time to time, passed us a link to a story on the GameDaily site. Today they're discussing the January NPD numbers for the games industry. In short, they're terrific. Software sales totaled $549 million for the month, up a staggering 53 percent over last year. Hardware sales were brisk as well, with the Wii selling around 436,000 units. Trailing behind were Microsoft and Sony, with 360 hitting 294,000 units sold and the PS3 selling 244,000 units. January had an extra week, which resulted in 'inflated' sales, but even after normalizing the data things were tremendous for the games industry in a month where there's normally a post-holiday slump.

Re:Troubling for Sony

[Itchyeyes]

No, I considered it. These numbers are US and Canada only, so the comparison is perfectly apt. NPD does not monitor oversees sales figures. In Japan, the numbers are actually worse for Sony. I think this article [gamasutra.com] sums up the situation well. As for Europe, the fact that they haven't released yet there is a bad thing, not an excuse. It would be better for the PS3 to be selling poorly in Europe at this point rather than not selling at all.

Re:A story in itself...

[AKAImBatman]

There are about 20-30 games out of the gigantic Playstation library of games, some 8000-9000, that don't function properly on the PS3.

Correction: There are 20-30 games (see sibling who disputes this figure) that don't function on the PS3. During the month of January, there was a far higher number of games (easily over 50%) that didn't function properly. To be specific, the PS2 emulation wasn't providing the full graphical quality of the PS2. As a result, the games were looking outright terrible when played on a PS3.

Sony recently fixed this problem with the release of the 1.5 patchset for the PS3.

It is not that they sold twice as many Wiis

[WillAffleckUW]

It is far more important how dramatic the drop in xBox360 and PS3 sales was.

In other words, those stacks of boxes you see in gameshops are not an illusion, but just the tip of the stockroom iceberg.

Now if I could only find a Wii LAN adapter and WiiPlay ... at least I am starting to see one or two Wii consoles at various stores in Seattle, but they tend to disappear quickly. Can't even get the LAN adapter or Wii Play if I drive to the store when they say they have them - gone by the time I get there.

Guess people really don't care that much about Talladega Nights ...

Re:Troubling for Sony

[king-manic]

Actually it's pretty easy to imagine. If they wanted superior graphics, FF would never have been on a Sony Platform. There were more powerful systems competing with both the PS1, and the PS2.

They also had a high profile falling out with nintendo too. They have since reconciled.

Using your bad math, Sony still loses

[not-enough-info]

About 300k PS2s and 244k PS3s - just wow. That's almost 550k consoles Sony sold in January alone.

Man, last place never looked so good!

Nintendo
        Wii - 436K
        DS - 239K
        GBA - 179K
        GC - 34K
total: 888K consoles.
Oops, I forgot ridiculous rounding... OMGz! Nintendo sold about 1 Million consoles!

Sony
        PS3 - 244K
        PS2 - 299K
        PSP - 211K
total: 754K consoles. Did I even need to mention the GameCube?

And, use some common sense and these numbers look insane:

Sony is losing money for every PS3 sold based on manufacturing costs [tgdaily.com] alone, never mind all those units sitting on store shelves. Sony won't even see respite from the bleeding until the 65nm process-shink slated [ps3fanboy.com] for late this year.
Nintendo makes a profit on every console they sell [arstechnica.com].

Wii LAN Adapter

[zCyl]

Now if I could only find a Wii LAN adapter

You can get identical functionality with certain Non-Nintendo LAN adapters. [nintendo.com] As the thread describes, it appears that you simply need one with matching vid/pid numers, and there appear to be several matching brands.

(I have used one of these with my Wii, and it works flawlessly, but at less expense and with fewer supply shortages.)

Re:PS3/360 vs WII

[iago-vL]

I myself spend between $100-$225 (a new games costs $69.99 CND for the ps2 on avg) CND a mo for games. I'm not sure what a casual gamer will spend.

I typically spend between $0 and $40/month for games, depending on whether or not I feel like picking one up. I typically stick with tried-and-true games for older systems. I'm working on PS2 right now.

Of course, it depends how casual you're looking.

Re:Troubling for Sony

[Anonymous Coward]

That concept doesn't apply when they're still cranking out new units from the factory.

Re:A story in itself...

[AKAImBatman]

You dumbfuck

Back atcha!

you tried to save face by linking to a fucking zdnet.com article?

I'm sorry. Did that hurt your fanboy feelings?

Run PS2 game on pre-1.5 on 480p set - perfect image quality.

BZZT! That is incorrect, sir! Running a 480p game at 480p works fine. Running a 480i game on the PS3, period, causes the issue. Specifically, there's a horizontal scaler that resamples the 480i output to the PS3's native 480p resolution. The problem was that this appears to have been done with naive line doubling, creating massive graphical problems. This has nothing to do with scaling 480p output to 1080p.

Since ZDNet hurts your fanboi feelings, here's a nice Beyond3D post [beyond3d.com] about the issue. I hope they don't use too many technical terms for you. We wouldn't want you to hurt yourself.

There was no change to PS1 or PS2 emulation with any firmware update - due to the fact that PS2 emulation is DONE IN HARDWARE.

Not quite. The Wii does Gamecube "emulation" in hardware, because it's bascially the same hardware with higher specs. The PS3 is a bit more complex in that PS2 programs would not be able to interact with the hardware correctly. As such, it uses a combination of emulation and original PS2 chips to provide PS2 compatibility. Things can and do break because of this.

Don't bother replying dimwit.

Who knew that feeding the trolls could be so much fun? Just keep digging your hole, friend. One bit 'o dirt at a time!

Re:Troubling for Sony

[hjf]

That just sucks, you'll need to upscale 720 to 1080 (1:1.5), that means interpolating 1 line every 2 from the original image. What's the point of HDTV? I thought it was to have "crisp clear" image, but that just won't work if you need to interpolate.

The same thing happens downscaling 1080 to 720: you need to throw away a lot (33%) of information. Sure, interpolation algorithms can take care of it, but it's just not the same.

So what? I don't think I want to buy 2 TVs, one for 720 and one for 1080, but neither do I want to watch 720 upscaled to 1080, nor 720 "windowed" to fit 1080 (black bars all around).

If at least they would have made it an integer number such as 720 to 1440 (that is 2560x1440), you could at least fit 720 to 1440 just repeating every pixel twice, and it would look just as good.

Re:A story in itself...

[AKAImBatman]

First of all, who rounds 436,000 to 500,000?

436,000 is only for the U.S. I said North America.

Second of all, adding your inflated 500,000 to the 1.1 million* they sold from launch to December puts them at 1.6 million. Adding MS' 300,000 to their 4.5 million* in NA puts them at 4.8 million.

I was speaking of total units worldwide at that point. Sorry, I should have clarified. Estimated worldwide units of XBox 360 are ~10 million while Wii sales are currently estimated to be approching 5 million units. If you lowball the figures, the estimates come out to about 9 million vs. 4 million respectively. That's still a LOT of units. Of course, lack of Japanese sales are really hurting the 360.

Despite the optimistic math, your point is solid. Good month for Nintendo.

Indeed. :-)

The big story people won't mention

[Overly Critical Guy]

When was the last time Nintendo sold 500,000 consoles per month during a non-holiday season in just North America? Dude, that is a LOT of consoles.

And here's the fact you don't see in the press--combined with the sales of the DS and GBA, that makes Nintendo the #1 console manufacturer in the world.

Re:Troubling for Sony

[trdrstv]

you can't be talking about the Saturn, with its horrible 3D, or the N64, which had comparable 3D but horrible storage capacity. Which systems are you talking about?

Of that Era The Saturn was a better 2D machine (it's a shame, it could have been a contender), and the PS1 didn't have 'comparable graphics' to the N64 (unless you feel the PS2 had 'comparable graphics' to the X-box). The N64 was much better at 3D modeling.

The rosey colored glasses come on though with the PS1 since we all remember the Pre-rendered CG cut scenes of FFVII (which was allowed by the greater capacity of the CD's) and forget how primitive the actual game was (graphically).

Re:Troubling for Sony

[shimage]

I think the HDTV standard includes 720p and 1080i, but not 1080p. As was already mentioned 1080i->1080p is going to work better than 1080i->720p for obvious reasons, but 720p on a 720p set will look marginally better than 1080i on anything. I don't get HD cable, so I have no clue what the distribution is like WRT what resolution broadcast stations like to use. But I do read gaming news, and it looks like the one resolution every game supports on both the Xbox360 and the PS3 is 720p. Oh, they can upsample all they want, but that isn't terribly different than just sending a 720p signal to your 1080i/p TV without the upsampling.

On the other hand, you might be better off just picking up a 1080p set anyhow (and just so you know, in the US it's closer to a $500 premium [and not $1k]). I have seen 1 (one) 720p set that actually had a native 720p resolution. All the other sets were native WXGA (1366x768), which pretty much need to rescale everything that isn't coming out of a computer. Sets that market themselves as 1080p, however, have uniformly had 1080p native resolution. And can someone please explain to me why plasma TV pixels aren't square? Maybe I'm not understanding something, but every plasma set I've seen is 1024x768, even though they're all widescreen (16:9), which implies 4:3 aspect pixels. In short, most HDTVs will require rescaling a large fraction of the time, so ... yeah. It's all kind of a wash. Personally, I wouldn't buy a new TV until the industry gets its act together.

Re:Troubling for Sony

[Anonymous Coward]

Final Fantasy 6 does belong on a top 5 list, but it's "Top 5 Popular Games Despite QA Dropping The Ball".

The biggest and most obvious bug in the game has to be how Evasion does absolutely nothing. Anything that enhanced Evasion was worthless. Even better, there's a section of the game where all the enemies have high Evasion, and you're supposed to have to adjust tactics to match.

Except that since Evasion does NOTHING, there's no change to be made.

And, there was Relm's Sketch command, which would frequently crash the entire game. You can almost sense the testing that went into this game.

I won't argue that it's a popular RPG that many people enjoy, but with bugs like those, there's no way it can claim the title of "best RPG".

Sony Australia tries "Sweeteners" to soften blow

[Guzzitza]

The PR campaign is gearing up here in Aus for the launch, theres an article in todays paper trying to tell me how Sony is giving us Aussies special treatment by giving us a free Bond DVD and free download of GT:HD (both things that as far as I was aware were available to all regions)

FTA: The launch of Sony's PlayStation 3 next month will be accompanied by a host of freebies that Sony hopes will take the sting out of the game console's $999 price tag. The James Bond film Casino Royale will be offered free to the first 20,000 buyers who register their PS3 online. Additionally the game Gran Turismo: HD will be available to all PS3 buyers as a free download from the PlayStation Network.

Article: http://www.smh.com.au/news/games/sony-unveils-play station-sweetners/2007/02/22/1171733923601.html [smh.com.au]