JoshuaJSlone said:
With sales flat or down for other consoles so far it's hard to say this is a problem yet. But year to date Wii is down about 800K in the US--certainly it would be better to have that extra 800K earlier than to have to fight harder for them later against competition who aren't standing still.
It depends on how much harder that sell really is. This is something we can't really discuss, as our stances are purely hypothetical, but if it turns out the later sell isn't very hard, then the time difference won't have posed a problem.
As I mentioned above, Wii is down about 800K in the US year to date. If the amount it's been down in the last three months holds for the next three months, through October it will be down 1.7 million. Last year they already set the record for what a home console could sell across November+December in the US, passing 4 million for the first time. If sales have been down for most of the year, why would we think they'll match that, let alone make up the difference? PS2 only had a November+December of greater than 3 million one time--and Wii's May-July numbers are well below what PS2 was doing in May-July of that year.
It depends on how much demand their new software creates.
Considering they already bumped up their production capacity so high, it would be a waste to... well, put it to waste. Even in a world where everyone who doesn't buy one now is going to buy one later, it's still better to reach milestone X at date Y, rather than date Y + a year.
This is an evaluation from a marketshare-biased perspective. It may not be better to do so when concerning potential profit.
It's always going to be better to have a higher userbase to sell more software and accessories, encourage more support from third parties, give people less reason to want to buy the competitions' machines, and in the long-term have a larger group of people (and publishers) automatically interested in the successor.
I'm having a hard time understanding how the one or two million extra consumers Nintendo would have attracted this year would have had any significance in these matters over the 50 million they already have.
Leondexter said:
It's always difficult to speculate "what if", but certainly there are consumers who are choosing an Xbox 360 over the Wii for the sake of price or value. It's most definitely not a "Wii or nothing" crowd out there anymore. Of course, it never was, but the balance is quite visibly changing.
I never sought to deny this, but rather that the consumers they would be attracting now would ever really wish to buy a 360 (at least until Natal is released, perhaps).
