Screen Digest: Wii is the “Great Unkown”
I’ll go out on a limb and say that the painful truth right now is that it is very fashionable at the moment to not favor the PS3. Such is the situation that even some PS3 zealots, choose to share the sentiment albeit with a few modifications, to be specific, choosing to focus the hate on the company behind the console and not the PlayStation 3 itself.
But what is this? An entity that actually credibly decries the Wii and foresees the PS3 dominating by 2010 and the Wii being a left at third place?
Get the rest of the story after the Jump.
I’ll go out on a limb and say that the painful truth right now is that it is very fashionable at the moment to not favor the PS3. Such is the situation that even some PS3 zealots, choose to share the sentiment albeit with a few modifications, to be specific, choosing to focus the hate on the company behind the console and not the PlayStation 3 itself.
But what is this? An entity that actually credibly decries the Wii and foresees the PS3 dominating by 2010 and the Wii being a left at third place?
Gamasutra informs that Screen Digest‘s report entitled – Next Generation Consoles: Games publishing, hardware analysis and forecasts to 2010, predicts that by 2010 the regional market share for next gen consoles, will be split evenly between the PS3 and the Xbox 360, apart from Japan where the PS3 will have the clear lead.
The overview comment of the report says: “PS2-style dominance will not be repeated in the next generation hardware market: we anticipate that competition will be far more intense with market shares split on a territorial basis.” Below, is the chart of predicted 2010 Console Market Shares as posted on Gamasutra:
Given the obvious strong start that the Wii has at the moment, Gamasutra just had to ask Screen Digest’s Ed Barton if the predictions for the Wii on the said report are somewhat conservative. He had this to say:
Can they repeat the kind of success that they’ve had with the DS by applying that strategy with the Wii? Absolutely, if Nintendo can make this work on a home console and appeal to those demographics outside the core gamer constituency, the potential is absolutely huge.
However he does add that they have a lot of faith in the ability of Sony especially now that they’re seeing unprecedented levels of support from Sony for the PlayStation 3. Barton notes:
no one buys one of these plastic boxes on technical specs alone, people tend to buy them for content. Our forecasts at the moment are based on the belief that PlayStation 3 has this level of support. The numbers that we’re seeing now for the Nintendo Wii, they’ve come out of the blocks fantastically strongly – no one would deny that – however it’s incredibly early in the hardware cycle. There’s still another five or six years to play out on this one, and the first big battleground will be Christmas of 2007.
Hence the big hullabaloo at the moment over a supposed “Wii drought.” Barton goes on to expound on why the Wii is considered to be gaming’s “great unknown” at the moment:
it’s very hard to take a view on a new strategy which is effectively what Nintendo are executing with the Wii. They’ve stepped aside in the graphical arms race, and improvements in graphical technology in a gaming sense has historically been what’s driven market growth, and having seen what they’ve done with the Nintendo DS – which obviously they’ve executed fantastically, and which has basically created a new gaming phenomenon – we don’t deny the possibility that this is a possibility with the Wii.
But we need to see publisher support going forward …and over 2007, going into 2008, maybe there’ll be various tipping points with publisher support on various big exclusives. We’ve already seen things like Dragon Quest going exclusive on the DS, but if we see those kind of tipping points on the Wii, we’ll have to amend our view, clearly. But at the moment, this is the view we’re taking.
Well, we’ve got No More Heroes, Metroid Prime 3, and Manhunt 2 to bank on. We will have to wait for them to show up though. Ah, waiting for future titles, when and for what did we hear that before?
Via Gamasutra