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[bishopcruz]

Bishop has anyone actually contested your first post in this thread? Has anyone actually attempted to challenge how the WiiU doesn't conform to the graphs presented there? Or challenge the very graph's conformity to the notion of a fad?

Not that I have seen. I had an interesting discussion with Opiate on the whole thing, he agreed that it fit the definition I'm using but was unconvinced that that was the only definition that could be used. We agreed to disagree.

But at least at that point we agreed that there was a massive drop-off, that it came with no real maturity phase, and that it was likely a combination of competition and other things that caused it.

I think the sales curve is a good one because it is falsifiable, it creates actual criteria that we can judge against, and it doesn't have a lot of subjective language. One definition I saw for fad online adds things like driven purely by hype, or providing nothing of value. I have issues with those definitions because they are subjective. If someone buys something, they are getting, or at least believe they are getting something of value out of it. How does one define something that is driven by hype as opposed to driven by market forces? Hell, even saying fads are short-lived creates its own issues as well. Short lived according to what?

Crocs are one of the most well known recent fads. They had a several year life cycle that began its rise in 2005, and was dead by 2008. Throughout that time, investors, fashoinistas, and consumers were debating whether or not it was a fad. Crocs shares rose to around $70 a pop, during the craze. After the fad they bottomed out at about $1. Recently they came back to around $13 or so, but never came close to that peak market.

Crocs, like the Wii were marketing to everyone, and never had a strong core base to fall back on once the market evened out. They were a fad, and while some were predicting a comeback in 2012 and even earlier this year, it looks like that comeback was never to be, they lost money again in 2013.

 

[Jac_Solar]

The COD crowd also play Madden/Fifa, Forza/GT, the occasional Uncharted/Assassin's and GTA

the Wii was for the grand masses a Sportswithmotion machine

Yeah, good point. I think the motion controls and the games helped the Wii transcend the stigma of gaming among the grand masses. As in, they, along with the pop culture media, didn't really perceive it as a gaming-console - it was more of an exercise or party gimmick/machine.

There was a heavy focus on very casual console games a couple of years ago - Guitar Hero, Buzz, Fitness games, and the likes. I think those types of games helped bring awareness to Wii.

 

[charlequin]

It also hurts understanding of what exactly happened to downplay the drop off of the Wii as you did. The Wii didn't magically transform from a great product to a terrible product once New Year's 2010 rolled around.

My position on this would basically be:

1. The content dropoff for the Wii actually began as early as 2008, we knew it was happening when Wii Music broke Nintendo's stream of casual hits, and in Media-Create threads in that era people already started predicting a major falloff for the system if Nintendo didn't change its strategy.
2. I'm not sure what your standard is for accepting Wii into the "fad" curve while rejecting the PS2, which similarly climbed extremely quickly and then fell off quickly. Is the one year hitch on the PS2 curve enough to count as "maturity" phase, even though it wasn't at the peak level? Is a pointy curve not a "fad" as long as it's over a long enough period of years? You'd expect a particularly successful console to hew closer to the fad chart in general since by virtue of being successful, more people buy it early on; if the product nears the cap for potential adoption (as I'd argue the Wii did) there simply aren't as many potential late-period customers.
3. Similarly, a portion of the difference between the Wii and the PS1/PS2 in particular has to do with global strategies: the Sony consoles were actively marketed to less wealthy nations in their late life, and continued to sell well there long after they'd dried up in the US/Japan. The Wii, conversely, had no comparable legacy program, and its individual sales curves in the US and Japan were more similar to PS2's than its global sales.
4. The Wii also experienced several unprecedented events during its generation, of which two (that interact with each other) are, to my mind, the most important: it cut across the curve for HDTV adoption (which in the US was something like 33% in 2006 and 66% in 2010) and it went up against two competing systems that had unusually long sales curves due to high initial price (and the aforementioned HDTV stat), with unusually desirable libraries (due to a wide range of factors.) In all previous generations a market leader that had reached the decline stage could coast as a low-cost option with a great library against new systems that had no games; the late-stage Wii, however, had to compete with relaunches of $200/$300 systems that already had excellent libraries.

Combining that stuff together, I guess the tl;dr of my argument is that I think you're overplaying how different the Wii's sales curves are from previous market leaders, and underplaying how unusual the generation was overall.

I'm not denying that the Wii fit the pattern of a quick-uptake, quick-falloff product, but to my mind using that to label it a "fad" is a little inflammatory and serves to disguise, rather than illuminate, the truth about how it performed in the market and how the people who bought Wiis fit into today's gaming industry.

 

[Nightstick11]

And that premise is flawed, LOOK AT THE SALES CURVES. The curve on the Wii is straight up, then straight down.

My premise is iron-tight. Let me repeat this again: in 2006, 2007, 2008, 2009, and 2010, the Wii sold well for five years. The first three record-breaking years account for your specious "straight up" claim. If you look at the declining years, you will note that the Wii IS STILL SELLING WELL. Not record-breaking. But well.

Because we wouldn't be discussing the Wii as much as we are now if it wasn't a market leader. Market leaders stay viable longer, especially in this industry, the bottom fell out of the Wii in 2010. 4 years. Not normal.

When my entire premise is that the Wii was not a fad because it sold for a full traditional five year cycle and then point to the number of consoles selling in five-year cycles, and you refuse to acknowledge these other consoles because they do not conform to your pet theory, you come off as attempting to intentionally mislead, to put it nicely.

Because we are talking worldwide numbers. And for the record the Wii fell off its cliff earlier in Japan than elsewhere. Sega itself officially dropped the Genesis after it licensed it out to Majesco, Brazil is under a similar deal. The reason I mention when the final games were released. Also a worldwide line would help smooth out regional differences and provide a more accurate overall picture.

As I pointed out before, when I was using specifically regional dates to see how the cycle works in specific regions, and you wordlessly lump launch dates in Japan with kill dates in Qatar, it came off again like you were trying to smudge the data. Which leads to smudgey claims like this:

But look at the sales curve of the Super Famicom, Japan only since it bothers you so much.

There is indeed a drop-off in Japan in 1995, after the console has hit it peak, from that point onwards the SNES follows a standard end of life cycle from that point onwards. It was still selling strong numbers in 1996, in fact it took a full year for the next king of the console space, the Playstation to catch up to the SFC's yearly sales.

Adjusted for truth, the SNES started to decline after five years. "Strong numbers in 1996" is not only vague, it neglects entirely the fact that the "market-leader" (a label you retcon arbitrarily onto the Playstation two decades away) did not have a strong launch year.

After five years on the market, Nintendo Wii gave Nintendo its best Black Friday ever. Were YoY #s down? Yes, from its peak. Were sales figures still solid compared to every other playform in history? Undeniably, yes.

Let's talk actual numbers even further. As mentioned before, it is a fact that the Wii sold well even in its "vertical line down". It went from selling 25 million annually to something like 18 million annually than 12 million annually and then finally it all but died. So into its fourth and fifth years on the market, it was still selling well.

You clearly are either ignoring data, or are being dishonest. More likely even, deluding yourself. Let's look at the Famicom sales on the chart above as well. Again, one territory so it doesn't offend your sensibilities.

The Famicom had 2 exceptional years in 1985 and 1986, after those years the Famicom had an exceptionally stable and slow decline, it returned to 1984 levels and stayed between 1-2 million sold a year for the next 5 years. Nintendo sales did not fall off a cliff, the Famicom kept on trucking FAR past this magical 5 year cycle.

The irony is rich in you.

The peak of the Wii was higher than the Famicom. Hell, the DECLINE of the Wii was higher than the NES, and even when the NES was "trucking along" (vague but let's roll with it) the Wii in its decline trucked along in higher numbers until the final year.

And of course, as you have all thread, you ignore the context of the next console in line as important. Or the fact that the Wii, was discontinued in 2 out of it's 3 major markets, with the US expected to follow sometime next year.

But whatever. Clearly this means more to you than it does me. I've said what I have to say.

I am the only one in this thread who was and is looking at the numbers for what they are and comparing them to every single system ever released. I'm not the one retroactively trying to arbitrarily exclude systems that cumulatively sold in the hundreds of millions or retconning the "real, true start date for when we start counting because market-leader" because of reasons.

The Wii sold for five years. Just like fifteen or more systems that preceded it.

Chop the numbers however you want, smudge the data, use fuzzy vague definitions, but the facts and numbers don't lie.

But hey, if you exclude 90% of hardware figures, your interpretation is spot-on!

 

[Nightstick11]

Really now? Chia pets, Furbies, tickle me elmo's, Disco, break dancing, and many more, simply prove that is not true.

Dude. Disco and break dancing were not fads. Everything popular is not a fad. Sometimes things get phased out or replaced by something in the next generation.

 

[IAmRandom31]

Nintendo killed its own audience with the Wii U controller. I know many people who were interested in the Wii U, including non gamers like my parent and grandparents who did own a Wii who saw that controller and said heck no.

Dunno, Nintendo changed the dynamic of the system and thus alienated the pure casual fanbase they bough with the Wii

 

[Visualante2]

Dust.

 

[hEist]

they dust.

 

[BrokenEchelon]

I wouldn't be at all surprised if there were tens of thousands of people who viewed the Wii as a Wii Sports machine in the same way a DVD player just plays DVDs.

After the novelty wore off, they moved on.

 

[CadetMahoney]

They bought the Wii and enjoyed the Wii Sports that came with it. Then they moved on with their lives.

I know my parents, my wife's parents and several other older couples who did exactly this.

They're playing iOS games on their Apple TV.

Playin a buncha mobile games where you slide an object from one side of the screen to the other over and over.

Playing casual games on their phones.

 

[bishopcruz]

My position on this would basically be:

1. The content dropoff for the Wii actually began as early as 2008, we knew it was happening when Wii Music broke Nintendo's stream of casual hits, and in Media-Create threads in that era people already started predicting a major falloff for the system if Nintendo didn't change its strategy.
2. I'm not sure what your standard is for accepting Wii into the "fad" curve while rejecting the PS2, which similarly climbed extremely quickly and then fell off quickly. Is the one year hitch on the PS2 curve enough to count as "maturity" phase, even though it wasn't at the peak level? Is a pointy curve not a "fad" as long as it's over a long enough period of years? You'd expect a particularly successful console to hew closer to the fad chart in general since by virtue of being successful, more people buy it early on; if the product nears the cap for potential adoption (as I'd argue the Wii did) there simply aren't as many potential late-period customers.
3. Similarly, a portion of the difference between the Wii and the PS1/PS2 in particular has to do with global strategies: the Sony consoles were actively marketed to less wealthy nations in their late life, and continued to sell well there long after they'd dried up in the US/Japan. The Wii, conversely, had no comparable legacy program, and its individual sales curves in the US and Japan were more similar to PS2's than its global sales.
4. The Wii also experienced several unprecedented events during its generation, of which two (that interact with each other) are, to my mind, the most important: it cut across the curve for HDTV adoption (which in the US was something like 33% in 2006 and 66% in 2010) and it went up against two competing systems that had unusually long sales curves due to high initial price (and the aforementioned HDTV stat), with unusually desirable libraries (due to a wide range of factors.) In all previous generations a market leader that had reached the decline stage could coast as a low-cost option with a great library against new systems that had no games; the late-stage Wii, however, had to compete with relaunches of $200/$300 systems that already had excellent libraries.

.

1. Interesting point. Though if the content drop off started then, it would be at least another year before the freefall began for the Wii. FY2009 was the peak of the system.

2. As for my standards. It's pretty simple. PS2 doesn't have a curve anywhere NEAR that of the Wii. I put together these graphs:

Here is the PS2:

Notice that while it is dropping off slowly over time, it is rare for sales to plummet. And when those drop offs happen, it tends to find a new relatively stable area in which to function. In the five years after its peak, it never dropped below 50% of it's yearly max. After that, it had a huge drop-off but stabilized, in its last three years, it went from 7.9 million to 6.5 million. It sold 6.5 million its 12 year on the market.

Now it is an anomaly, as game systems have planned obsolescence built into their life cycle, which is why most consoles seem to follow a fashion line over the years as compared to other goods.

But this:

is the Wii. I ran Nintendo's official numbers myself just to make sure the curve that we have been using in the thread was an accurate representation. It was. The decline is linear. And as others have said in this thread, nothing Nintendo did put so much as a dent in it.

Now again, declines have to happen after the peak year, or else it wouldn't BE a peak year. But dropping from that height to its current lows without a successor on the market is pretty damning. Even WITH a successor, you don't see things like this.

3. Interesting point, but I can't find numbers on US PS2 sales by year to compare with the Wii numbers. I do know that it sold 50 million more after 2006, which is pretty impressive. Sony just gives WW numbers, but if the numbers in the US, Japan and Europe followed a similar trend to the Wii, Sony would have to be selling massive numbers in these other regions to make up for it. And that isn't outside the realm of possibility. If you know a place which has the YOY regional numbers for the PS2 I'll gladly look them over.

4. That's all true, and I don't want to discount it, but it does again speak to Nintendo being unable to hold on to its market. One of the big arguments I see for the Wii was that Nintendo realized that their market didn't care about graphics. If that's the case then the HD twins shouldn't have proven much of a threat to their casual market over time. Their core gamer market was never that strong to begin with, and yeah it had jumped ship in the later years as well. They had no one left, except maybe the kids market, and MS was attacking that hard with the Kinect. If graphics and processing was ever a real concern then the Wii had a sell-by date from the beginning.

Combining that stuff together, I guess the tl;dr of my argument is that I think you're overplaying how different the Wii's sales curves are from previous market leaders, and underplaying how unusual the generation was overall.

I'm not denying that the Wii fit the pattern of a quick-uptake, quick-falloff product, but to my mind using that to label it a "fad" is a little inflammatory and serves to disguise, rather than illuminate, the truth about how it performed in the market and how the people who bought Wiis fit into today's gaming industry

But a quick-uptake, quick-falloff. product is the definition of a fad. And its nature as a product like that said quite a lot about what its effects in the market were. The generation was segmented, where you had two slow burning systems selling loads of software to a different market than where the Wii. That market slowly expanded while the Wii went nuts.

And yeah, I get that people don't like the term fad, and I try to be as clinical as I can with it, but it fits. The blue ocean that was the goal of Nintendo with the Wii proved incredibly shallow. Fads are often very susceptible to competition and knock offs, and much of the talk in this thread has been about how casual games on smart phones, or the Kinect, or what have you out competed Nintendo in their own space.

I think the lessons we can learn are two-fold, one is that there is a huge market out there that wants to play games, if they are delivered to them in an nonthreatening, inviting, and easy to play manner. The second part of it is, that that market at least as it stands now, is remarkably fickle. I think Nintendo realized that when designing the Wii U as they clearly wanted to get a strong core base playing their system, they just mucked it up to no end.

 

[charlequin]

1. Interesting point. Though if the content drop off started then, it would be at least another year before the freefall began for the Wii. FY2009 was the peak of the system.

In the US (which I think is a more illuminating proxy for the overall system's performance) the Wii's best sales month was December 2009, its fourth holiday, which perfectly aligns with PS2's pattern (its best sales month was December 2003, its fourth holiday month.)

The Wii was also still clearly a viable product in the US through the end of 2011, when it still did over 1 million during December. This is the point where it seriously diverges -- the PS2 bounced at this point, for what I would argue are unusually positive late-stage conditions for it and unusually poor late-stage conditions for Wii. But until then, their US sales curves are more or less identical. The PS2 didn't maintain a longer "maturity" plateau; it took the exact same bell-curve pattern for its main life, then tacked on a successful second life as a legacy offering.

3. Interesting point, but I can't find numbers on US PS2 sales by year to compare with the Wii numbers.

They're out there, distributed amongst the interwebs, at least.

If you know a place which has the YOY regional numbers for the PS2 I'll gladly look them over.

I'll see if I can dig anything up.

4. That's all true, and I don't want to discount it, but it does again speak to Nintendo being unable to hold on to its market.

Oh, I definitely agree there. If the argument's going to be about incompetence on Nintendo's side at managing and cultivating the audience they built, I will happily support it -- they did a terrible job. But I think that has more to do with their choices as a platform-holder, and with differences of degree in the makeup of their audience, rather than a fundamental difference in kind between the Wii and other successful consoles.

If graphics and processing was ever a real concern then the Wii had a sell-by date from the beginning.

I think calling it "graphics and processing" is a bit misleading; I would drill this down to the real issues of "compatibility with popular displays" and "ability to run certain mass market game titles."

And yeah, I get that people don't like the term fad, and I try to be as clinical as I can with it, but it fits.

I think the downside of this label is that it tends to obscure a lot of elements which are relevant in the broader conversation we're having here -- ways in which the Wii is actually pretty similar to other systems. When you get down to it, the model of how Wii owners bought software, of how they reacted to price drops, of how they used secondary features of the system, of how much they used the system, etc. were all very much in kind with the way previous consoles had been modeled, because by and large the Wii audience was just a differently-sliced subgroup of the general audience for gaming systems and electronic entertainment.