Wii still leading consoles, but for how long?
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Video Game Chartz has released the hardware sales chart for America for the week ending Nov. 10, and once again Nintendo’s Wii is first and Sony has come in last.
The Wii came in first for the week at 192, 482, followed by the Xbox 360 at 173,895 and the DS at 142,299. Sony’s PSP came in a distant fourth at 75, 954 and the Playstation 3 came in an even more distant fifth at 63, 788.
All three next-gen consoles saw a jump in sales, though: 31 percent for the Wii, 25 percent for the Xbox 360 and 15 percent for the PS3.
I once predicted the Wii was the future of video game consoles. I said, since the Wii changes how we play games instead of just how we view them, it would be able to over take the Xbox 360 and PS3, which certainly go farther in terms of hardware power but don’t fundamentally do anything different than the original Playstation.
I think a lot of the industry on the console production side is focused on better hardware power for consoles because that’s what has worked before. If you look at the jumps from system to system, what what you notice most in the slide show is the change in detail, from 8-bit to 16-bit to 32-bit and the era of the Playstation, which by my estimation only ended with this generation. The real fundamental change, though, is the change in gameplay.
Indeed, much of Nintendo’s success comes from seeing where the next change in how we play games is going to come from. Likewise, their failure comes from not seeing these jumps. Sony won the last generation because all the other companies that got involved, Nintendo, Microsoft and to some extent Sega, were content to try to do more of the same, and the Playstation 2 just did it better, either because it was more powerful or more deeply embedded. If Nintendo, or anyone else for that matter, had figured out a new way to play games we probably wouldn’t have seen the Playstations dominate as heavily as they did, if they would have dominated at all.
Mario’s adventures across the consoles is a perfect example. Super Mario Bros. defined platforming in the 8-bit era. The next great change you notice is Super Mario 64 and the jump to 3D, which defined the 3D platforming genre. Where Mario failed most is Super Mario Sunshine, which didn’t do anything fundamentally different from Super Mario 64. It may be too soon to call Super Mario Galaxy yet another redefinition of platforming from a historical perspective, but that hasn’t stopped reviewers from doing so.
What really amazes me, however, is the public’s almost unquestioning acceptance of the Wii’s new terms of playing games. Usually people are very slow to accept change. Even though most of the games on the Wii are epic fail at fully utilizing the consoles innovations, the exceptions being first-party games, the console continues to sell out the day stores receive new shipments. Perhaps the public was already thirsty for something new after a prettier version of more of the same from last generation, even if the new doesn’t exactly work perfectly?
The real test for the Wii now is whether Nintendo will continue to string us along from one exceptional first-party game to the next, a third-party company will step in and finally get the motion controls as perfect as Nintendo does so the system can really show what it can do or the Wii slowly fades away into obscurity, something that could’ve been a revolutionary turning point in how we play games but turned into little more than a novelty for most people.
If nothing else, the Wii has shown there is serious money to be made in doing something differently. Hopefully console makers, and developers even more so, will take note.
Tags: hardware, microsoft, nintendo, playstation-3, ps3, sales, sony, wii, xbox
