For Gamespots take

http://au.gamespot.com/news/6170776.aspx?action=convert&om_clk=latestnews&tag=latestnews;title;4

or straight to the source

http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601109&sid=aTVZj2sgVtvk&refer=home

Some intersting points

The net loss at Tokyo-based Sony may have widened to 75.8 billion yen ($630 million) in the fiscal fourth quarter ended March 31, from 66.5 billion yen a year earlier, according to the median estimate of 11 analysts surveyed by Bloomberg. Sales probably rose 9.5 percent to 2.02 trillion yen, the survey showed.

PlayStation 3 is being outsold by Wii by about two to one, causing Sony' s game division, its second-largest by revenue, to post a fourth-quarter loss of 121 billion yen (US$1 billion) and a record 245 billion yen deficit for the fiscal year, according to five of the 11 analysts. The loss may exceed profits from electronics such as Bravia televisions, and the movie unit, whose ``Spider-Man 3' ' generated record box-office sales when it opened this month.

Sony sold 501,000 PlayStation 3 consoles in the U.S. from January to March, compared with Wii sales of 1.03 million, according to market researcher NPD Group Inc., based in Port Washington, New York. Microsoft sold 721,000 Xbox 360 players.

The hype and sales of wii will probably go down very fast once people realise there isn' ät much games out for it,and they see the great power of next-gen on ps3/360 and those prices for those consoles go down.

The hype and sales of wii will probably go down very fast once people realise there isn' ät much games out for it,and they see the great power of next-gen on ps3/360 and those prices for those consoles go down.

Lol, If anything Quez, Wii sales will go up much higher once they are freely available..

Your thinking that everyone who buys a Wii are Hardcore gamers... WRONG.. Ever heard of the term: ' Non-gamers?' This is more or less a new market Nintendo created / catered. Nintendo / Wii has yet to reach the potential tens of millions of ' Non gamers' .

**Watch this space**

Wii music, Wii fitness, a New project by the makers of Nintendogs..

The Wii sales will rocket into oblivion. (and that is just a few of a big handful of ' Non gamer' projects we have yet to hear about)

Quez where is your evidence that better graphics/power = better market share?

Last time i checked the ps1, ps2 & DS were all convincing market leaders and neither were the most powerful platform.

The only way the Wii will fail is poor thirdparty support, but from the looks of things this won' t be happening, and in any case the Wii continues to sell despite its lack of quality software.

The Wii makes money from the start, so it is in a better position to drop prices. Apparently the 360 will become profitable in 2008, and the ps3 who knows when that will be profitable. I feel that microsoft will only drop the 360' s price as a knee jerk reaction to any ps3 price drop.

I am with Quez the wii is cool but that’s just it cool. The wii will fall to 3rd place sooner or later. To me I think it’s a fad kind of like pokemon but it does appeal to the non gamers.

The hype and sales lol it’s not that people are buying them like crazy they are I will agree to that. But wii will lose badly just watch. But I would love to have a 360 over a wii. But hey that’s me and that’s what I think.

Actually, Virtua is right.

I think the Wii will be in 2nd or 3rd when it comes to software sales, but for console sales it has a great chance at 1or2.

I recently started working at WalMart(I know, stone me later. Its a partime job, only one other than fastfood around) and a 42 year old woman came through my line with a Wii. I attempted some friendly conversation by saying " this just made some kid' s day" . Her response? " My kid is in college, this just made my day. They look so darn cute I had to get one." I was thinking this may just be a crazy one time thing, that all the supposed " impulse buys" people said the Wii got were a joke.... until about a week ago, when not 1, but 2 people came through with Wii' s. 1, another woman early to mid 40' s, the other a man who looked to be in his 30' s.

This type of model would not work for MS/Sony as they loose money on consoles and need software sales, but for Nintendo, who actually makes money on the console, this could be a great business model, even if people arent buying much software.

Mikayd2: You wish the Wii will do badly. You dam well how much it will sky rocket.

I hate Pokemen with a passion but to call it a ' Fad' obviously you havent a clue.. That same Fad just had it' s lastest installment on DS last month and has sold well over a million already.

Actually, i vastly underscored that:

the Pokémon franchise, Diamond and Pearl, have reached the " Million Sales" mark just 5 days after their release in North America.

hehe..

Mikayd2: You wish the Wii will do badly. You dam well how much it will sky rocket.

To me its an fad it will die soon that thing cant compete with the mega consoles for ever. Thats just what I think. Wii I wish I had one lol but a brotha cant find one.

I thought initially that the Wii would just be a one year passing fad, but it does seem that it has managed to penetrate beyond the usual gaming market. It will inevitably head the top selling console list (of this gen anyway, nothing will ever catch PS2 sales).

Sony we does appear to be in deep brown stuff at the moment. They have failed to carry over PS2 owners into their new machine. Lack of headline titles and cost seem to be the main thing. They will have to decide getting towards Xmas this year whether to stick with the price and accept that Wii and 360 will outsell them, or try a price slash to generate sales but obviously hitting their pocket even more. Someone is going to have to make a giant call that could affect all of us in terms of this generation of consoles, and ultimately the next, as profits here will drive the development of the next one.

Ain' t it just cute how Sony/Microsoft have become scared of the little " last-gen" Wii. I remember Microsoft calling it a nice new way to play videogames at first. Now that Nintendo is catching up they do nothing else but say how " underpowered" and stupid it is to play with.


I doubt Sony will be able to drop the price that fast.

Wasn' t the money they were losing on the console already at 200 or 250€ a unit. Dropping the price all sounds good but I doubt even Sony can drop the price by 100€. In Europe that would still be at 550€ and that' s still a lot of money.

So if you look at it they would get a minimal sales boost but increasing their own loss per unit considerably.

I doubt a significant price drop will be seen this year.

As for Nintendo and the Wii...well they' ve been earning money with it since the start. Third party developers are all realizing their mistake and quickly start making something for the Wii. Sure we' re getting a lot of crappy ps2 ports for now but hey can' t blame them for wanting to make a profit out of the succes that is the Wii. They didn' t expect the Wii to do so well and now they all want to make something for it. That alone is already a good indication of things to come.

As for the Wii sales going down anytime soon. I don' t think so.

Look at it this way. PS3 even with a price drop will still be to expensive for the majority of people. A price that I aswel ain' t willing to pay to play some games. Home isn' t interesting at all and as for graphics...Well I don' t give a sh*t about HD and how many polygons something has. I want good gameplay. For great online you have the 360. For the gameplay you have the Wii. Although they tried a quick rip off with their sixaxis. Casual gamers or non gamers don' t care about graphics. A great example is my brother. He was over for the weekend saw me play Sonic and the secret rings and said it looked really beautiful. He even wanted to play it himself. Also got him hooked on Wii sports right away and normally he never plays games. Showed him some 360 screens from gears of war and PS3 genji stuff and he said he didn' t really see any difference.

Then we have the Wii which is affordable, appeals to hardcore gamers (when the decent third party and first party titles hit the Wii. Looking forward to NiGHTS, No more Heroes and Disaster: day of crisis and Project H.A.M.M.E.R and Prime) casual gamers and perviously non-gamers. And new ways of gameplay that will really get good once developers get the hang of it.
Nintendo is already making profit meaning they can drop the price whenever they please to boost the sales again.

Wii isn' t going down anytime soon as much as some people want it to. Seems Sony and Microsoft fanboys feel very threatened by the " stupidweaknotubermediacenter" platform that is the Wii.

Well that' s how I view things.


Oooh and about the PS2 being the winner of last gen. In pure sales there' s no arguing about that. But as in how much profit that was made the gamecube owned the xbox and ps2. It' s business so in the end who wins?? The one who made the most profit ofcourse.

Nintendo seems to have a nack for making their consoles profitable from the start and that without any good third party support look at the Cube. The Wii is going to get that support. So really everyone saying the Wii is going to disappear without putting up a fight might just as well go live in a fantasy world created by Microsoft and Sony about how much their system owns the Wii.

It doesn' t matter how many Wii' s are sold, it' s still an inferior console compared to 360 or PS3.

That all depends on what you are searching for in your gaming system.

360 has best online

Wii has best gameplay and old titles being released on the console.

PS3 has nothing in my eyes besides a huge picetag.

True in pure power the Wii falls short. But you could say aswell that the 360 and ps3 fall well short on part of pushing the gaming market to new unexplored roads and gameplay.

Everyone can buy what they like and I' m sure they' ll have fun with it but I won' t buy a PS3 for things like Motorstorm. Played it and found it to be...well nothing special at all. It looked great but that' s all. Resistance fall of man has small maps and for one like me who likes to be a sniper it' s just to rediculous that I can' t even go and lie down. And to be a real sniper the maps are just way to small. The only title that I like that' s for PS3 is MGS4 but I ain' t paying a huge amount of money for just one game.

The 360 is more interesting than the ps3 in my eyes because we might get Shenmue3 on it. If that happens I' ll buy a 360 Shenmue 3 and Virtua Fighter 5.

Each console has it' s own good points 360 for online, PS3 for it' s graphics and Wii for it' s gameplay. There' s no reason to keep fighting about who' s better than who when everybody has his own taste and different things they are looking for in a console.

Discussions such as Console X is superior to console Y because of this and that are just plain boring and serve no point at all since some will agree and others will disagree.

Meh now I' m starting to sound like a boring old man.

Wii has best gameplay and old titles being released on the console.

All three consoles have backwards compatibility. I would argue that the Wii does not have the best gameplay either. How can it have better gameplay when it has no games? Hence the reason I say it' s inferior. Wii has almost nothing going for it over the other two. Just a few exlusives and a lower price. The wiimote is meaningless, online on Wii is shit, the quality of the games (technical merit) is 5 years behind the 360/PS3. Wii is a rip off even at it' s price. If my gaming computer was five years old I' d throw it in the trash. Wii' s popularity is a testiment to how little people care about what they buy. I don' t see how some people can tollerate that with consoles when the competition is of vastly better quality along with more/better games.

Demonoroth Very True..



I must add, people going mad about Nintendo' s Lack of 1st Party Support. If you really look into why theres very little by nintendo as yet, you' ll see a very good reason:

3rd Party Support

Namco: " Being a 3rd party Supporter on a Nintendo Platform the Biggest competitor you have, is Nintendo"

On previous Nintendo systems, 3rd Parties Never stood a chance..
Why?

..Nintendo would frequently release their games and no one would give a shit about the 3rd Party stuff and leave it on the shelf.. 3rd Parties would be giving Nintendo the V-sign saying ' What the hell do you expect us to do!?' ..

Nitntendo' s clocked on to this and are now spreading their games out over longer periods. T

his has worked well so far, Not only have 3rd Parties made a good profit (they used mostly PS2 / PSP ports to test the water) but more Devs / Publishers are being attracted and now we are seeing ' 1st Team' 3rd Party games on the horizon IE Namco, Temco, EA, SEGA, Ubisoft.

Now that Nintendo is catching up they do nothing else but say how " underpowered" and stupid it is to play with.

Not to defend MS or anything, but it could also be the fact that Nintendo shot down the idea of Wii60 after Peter Moore said that for the price of a ps3 you could get a 360 and a wii, then Nintendo responded by saying they' d rather people buy just a wii and get extra stuff with it. That certainly couldnt have made things good between Nintendo and MS

All three consoles have backwards compatibility. I would argue that the Wii does not have the best gameplay either. How can it have better gameplay when it has no games? Hence the reason I say it' s inferior. Wii has almost nothing going for it over the other two. Just a few exlusives and a lower price. The wiimote is meaningless, online on Wii is shit, the quality of the games (technical merit) is 5 years behind the 360/PS3. Wii is a rip off even at it' s price. If my gaming computer was five years old I' d throw it in the trash. Wii' s popularity is a testiment to how little people care about what they buy. I don' t see how some people can tollerate that with consoles when the competition is of vastly better quality along with more/better games.

Wii' s popularity is a testiment to how little people care about what they buy.

..But just wanted to have another go of that fun Bowling game they was good at, at their son' s house last weekend

Go Nintendo!

..But just wanted to have another go of that fun Bowling game they was good at, at their son' s house last weekend

Go Nintendo!

I find Wii sports boring even when I' m drinking, or smoking Canadian weed. Enough said.

The lak of good games for the Wii is where it might fail. Im considering getting one, but for what reason? Mario Galaxy? I have Zelda for GCN, so no reason to get that. im not much for party games, i dislike Metroid though the new one having fps controls might be worth considering.

All the 3rd party options seems to be sloppy ports of the PS2 counterparts with new controls that hardly seem to work well.

Where are the epic titles for the Wii? like Mass Effect, Gears of War, Final Fantasy. you cant create epic settings on the Wii, because it will ultimately be compared to prettier games like on the 360 or PS3.

The wii will work best with games like Super Paper Mario where the graphics are a bit mroe abstract.

In any case ill get it to play Mario Kart and the paper mario series which is great. But graphics consoles will always pull me in more because they can create something that the Wii cannot!

I think the Wii is going to keep selling pretty steadily, simply because it' s reaching a demographic that doesn' t care about deeply immersive games. For that matter, the people buying it don' t care as much about buying a couple of new games every month, either.

I think what more hardcore gamers really have to be concerned about, though, is the fact that there' s going to come a time when these deeply immersive, hardcore kinds of games are no longer going to be affordable to make. They are requiring bigger and bigger development teams, and steadily increasing development time. At some point the cost of development relative to the risk of actually turning a profit is going to be the real limit of how epic and advanced in graphics, physics and AI can get. Think about how much more conservative and wary the industry has become, preferring to churn out sequels to taking risks on new IPs. Although my hat' s off to the developers who have gambled on new IPs and won in this new generation of consoles, the big publishers like EA and Activision' s modus operandi is almost all sequels and licenses all the time.