Wii U Not a Threat to PS3, Says Sony Boss

[The.Bard]

Audiences differ so much it's not even really comparable. It would be interesting to graph the number of consoles sold versus the average number of games sold per platform.

For example, I know thousands of people who have Wiis, but most only have one or two games. On the other side, I know less people who have Playstations and xboxs, but know that they consistently buy games for them.

Then you are in luck, because these numbers exist! They're called "tie ratios":

The hardware to software tie ratio shows how many games a system owner buys on average. A system's tie ratio is Total Software Unit Sales divided by Total Console Unit Sales.

The article is a great read on the current scenario if you're interested in sales figures, but if you're not, the abridged version is below it:

http://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/6350/npd_behind_the_numbers_march_2011.php?page=3


As you surmise, Wii is the weakest at 7.2 games per unit owner (and that number has been growing now that the Wii has essentially stopped moving off of retail shelves - it used to be ~6). PS3 is next with 7.8 per owner. And 360 is averaging 8.9.

In English, your average 360 owner has nearly 2 more games than your average Wii owner... although it's probably more, since 360/PS3 owners have a much larger online game catalog than the Wii does, and downloadable game purchases aren't included in these figures.

Hope that's what you're looking for!

 

[darkbshadow]

Honestly I hope that my current console stays as the current gen console for at least another 3years. The graphics are fine on it and I don't feel like shelling out 300-400$ for a new console. As long as developers can develop great games still I'll be happy with my console.

 

[The.Bard]

Audiences differ so much it's not even really comparable. It would be interesting to graph the number of consoles sold versus the average number of games sold per platform.

For example, I know thousands of people who have Wiis, but most only have one or two games. On the other side, I know less people who have Playstations and xboxs, but know that they consistently buy games for them.

The figures are on Vgchartz. Not entirely accurate but give you a rough idea. The ratios are like this:

Wii:7.78

Ps3: 7.82

X360:9.05

Thats in games per console sold. So people who buy wiis buy the same amount of games as Ps3 owners. Unfortunately a bigger proportion are causual titles, but there's still a lot of good stuff on the wii. Check the facts next time you make some assumption about the wii.

When are your #'s from? The newest NPD #'s I could find were from March 2011... Wii was only 7.2, and 360 was 8.9. But that's nitpicking.

Before we get angry about people assuming the Wii doesn't sell games, let's remember that it has effectively stopped selling hardware for the last two years (though the price drop may have bumped it a bit). Look at the sales graph for year over year sales; it's mostly been plummeting like a 16 ton anvil.

"Why does that matter?" you may be asking. Well, if games keep coming out and the systems aren't moving, that means the Tie Ratio is gonna go way up. It wasn't that long ago that the Wii's average was under 6.

But let's be honest, here. There are two groups of Wii owners. The people who have 15+ games because they love Mario... and then the majority of the population, who bought the system and never went beyond Wii Sports. I know four suckers who bought a Wii, and if you throw all of their games they bought in a bag you'd have 7.

 

[Something Amyss]

Not surprising. No one would ever say otherwise.

Especially not Sony. Sony could be the sub ject to a strategic bombing in which all their manufacturing sites were destroyed, their offices targeted by a gas attack that caused their organs to liquefy, and be brought up on charges for investor fraud and describe their situation as "pretty good."

 

[RA92]

So it becomes less that the hardware itself can't prduce the results and more that the developers don't want to optimise their results to get the best out of the hardware.

I'm really tired of people being so judgmental on developers. Look, the PS3's architecture is really complicated. This is the reason why Gabe Newell was so annoyed about developing games for the PS3, and John Carmack himself said that there is probably not a single person on Earth who fully understands the PS3's architecture. If you just looked at the manual sets for everything about the core processor, the cell processors, the GPUs and the development environments on there, probably no-one even knows all the switches to the linker to optimise all the different things on here.

What, you think the developers spending years and millions of dollars working on multi-platform game engines like idTech 5, CryEngine 3, Frostbite 2.0 are all a bunch of lazies?

The fact that current generation engines can support deferred shading, morphological anti-aliasing, advanced environmental destruction on half a decade old hardware is amazing enough. Of course you're not going to get 60FPS at 1080p with just 256MB of RAM and another 256MB of dedicated GPU. Remember how I said CoD 4 run at 60FPS? The XBox also needs to scale down the game to 640p to support that. Same with Red Dead Redemption. Now are you going to say dedicated console game developers are lazy as well?

And I have yet to see the WiiU's hardware specs, I'll come to a conclusion after I see it.

Edit: Also, comparing WipeOut to BF3? Are you fucking kidding me?

 

[FredTheUndead]

SUPERMAN NOT A THREAT TO LEXCORP, SAYS LUTHOR

 

[gdv358]

The thing about boasting that the PS3 could fend off the WiiU is that it requires we all forget that right now, even if mainstream gamers don't like the thing as much, the PS3 has yet to even beat the first Wii's market share. The price point and all that are an advantage, yes, but when you take into account Sony's shaky relationship with the customer and the fact that a lot of the biggest problems with the Wii (lack of HD and lack of serious third party support) are being addressed, Sony's got a problem.

I'm not saying the WiiU will be as much of a success as the original (and, yes, regardless of personal opinion of the thing, if you can sell that many consoles and turn a profit the whole time, you've just built a cash generator). But the WiiU doesn't have to do as well as the original to be a threat to Sony. Even if it takes dead last place in the sales charts it would still eat into PS3's market share at a time when they're just starting to build up steam.

It's kind of like in politics, even if the third party candidate is an absolute loser, at some point they'll spoil the chances of one of the main two just by being on the ballot. The same is true here. With the price of consoles and the recession still in full bloom, every WiiU sold to someone who doesn't already own a PS3 is potentially another PS3 that isn't sold. To be dismissive of it is to show that Sony still doesn't really understand the industry and have just been very lucky to manage the level of success they had in the previous generations. (Even if the PSPgo kind of did that already)

I'm not saying that they should be panicked and trying to push out a PS4 (that would be a bad idea). But now is probably the time for them to figure out how to differentiate themselves from the competition rather than focus on trying to play copycat and talk about how they aren't worried about the competition. Ditch the gimmicks and the boasting, start addressing the real issues (might want to start with security). Until they do that, even the worst competition could ruin their prospects.

Though, until I see something spectacular out of it, I'm now tempted to call the WiiU the "WiiNader"

 

[DrunkWithPower]

Can Sony please stop trying to kill Nintendo? It's not working out and Sony's got some work to do anyway, like advance the XMB for starters. It's been the same one for 4 years now....

 

[mad825]

Well, the WiiU is playing a bad game of poker. Nintendo knows that the Wiiu is nothing superior nor will it easily compete with main consoles in terms of graphical and game-play technology so for a company like Sony to boast is...well, predicable.

 

[Negatempest]

I gotta be honest, I don't see much coming from the Wii U. Everyone was looking forward to the Wii, and it turned out to be a gimmick with hardly any decent games, whilst, the PS3 has had allot of good games. I think the Wii U is going to suffer the same fate, it doesn't really seem that amazing of a concept to me.


Too early to say for sure. A touchscreen was blasted for being "gimicky". So were 3D capabilities. Don't forget how cell phones 1st started, that was priceless. But more to my response...There is too much talk about "ports" and the Wii shovelware. Nintendo really lacked 3rd party support for the Wii mostly because the Wii could not handle what developers wanted to make. Now the Wii U "should" handle what developers can make and give a completely different experience compared to the competitors because of the controller. The worst thing that could happen to the Wii U is a lack of 3rd party support. Just have to wait and see what happens.

 

[funguy2121]

It's interesting how they think they know. No-one has been told the specs yet, although I guess some people in the industry must know.

But saying that, Sony seem to be right, certainly Nintendo haven't promised or fake demoed or tech demoed anything even slightly better than what the 360 and PS3 could do 2 years ago. The PS3 still had a disc format with 40GB more storage than Nintendo's unreleased console and has better processing power than the 360, which itself doesn't seem to be too threatened by the Wii U.

I don't want to call anything yet, but if the Wii U can't match the 720 or PS4 in power, it will be released against better consoles, consoles that have easy local multiplayer, with controllers far better at the sort of games available (it's still better to play games like Mario Kart, of Smash Bros with a wheel or classic controller), with far greater libraries, established bases, experienced internet provides and with a much better track record at 3rd part support.

And yet, almost every multiplatform launch looks better on the technically "inferior" 360. Because it's much easier to develop for.

Do you know who also makes easy-to-develop-for consoles?

(Rhymes with "Shmintendo.")

 

[Gralian]

Of course, what the Sony boss isn't saying is that they've already begun development on the Playstation 4. Gamespot had a brief article mentioning it a while back and Microsoft have also begun tweeting for talent to help work on their next generation console.

Sony are saying this to maintain their integrity, but the joke's on us when they release their next gen console a year (or less) after the Wii U, and honestly, once the next gen "heavyweights" (Microsoft and Sony) are released, it's more than likely going to make the Wii U look like how the Wii currently does to the PS3 and 360. That's not to say the Wii is a bad console, or that the Wii U is going to be, but that in terms of technology it's undoubtedly going to be inferior. Saying that a next gen console has the graphical prowess of current gen consoles is not a good thing.

 

[Baresark]

I gotta be honest, I don't see much coming from the Wii U. Everyone was looking forward to the Wii, and it turned out to be a gimmick with hardly any decent games, whilst, the PS3 has had allot of good games. I think the Wii U is going to suffer the same fate, it doesn't really seem that amazing of a concept to me.

The "gimmick" of the Wii outstripped its competition so thoroughly that the PS3 is still playing catchup in terms of total unit sales. They're still at least 30 million units behind. If that is the Wii U's "fate", then I'd say that Nintendo is probably not too upset about a "fate" like that. Nintendo can sell "gimmicks" like no one else. Don't forget, this is the company that made things like built-in rumble a staple of the consoles we have today.

The true reason why Sony doesn't want to push a PS4 is simple. They, like Microsoft, don't want to admit they lost this generation's console wars, and instead of pushing forward with the new big thing and likely wiping the floor with Nintendo's new console, they're stubbornly clinging to their Wii-ripoff hardware and Wii-ripoff games in a desperate attempt to scrape their sales up to the same levels as the Wii. Both companies have poured so much money into this gen that they're trying to stay attached to it as long as possible in an attempt to recoup their losses.

Expect reality to set in for these two companies by next year's E3. By that point, they'll either already be working on a new console to showcase at E3 the following year (making likely release dates sometime between holiday 2013 or by holiday 2014 at latest) or they'll still be stubbornly trying to compete with the Wii and thus fall into seriously hot water once the Wii U gets its foot in the door of both casual and hardcore markets. The other big 2 will no doubt produce a better console....but they simply can't afford to rest on their current gen when their competitor is about to push out a new console that can meet their current gen specs. And, worse news for them, Wii U will be producing some of the big hardcore titles that gave Sony and Microsoft at least one good draw for customers that the Wii didn't have. I don't think they will be quite so confident once the console has produced some actual gameplay footage at next year's E3.

That's not to say that the Wii U is a huge step up....my optimism on that note has faded. But there's no doubt it'll sell like hotcakes, and if its figures start to compete with Sony and Microsoft's current consoles, it'll be too late by that point for them to do anything about it. We'll just have to see how the Wii U fares in a poor economy that the last gen of consoles was not released in.

I couldn't agree more. Also, take into account the loss in revenue they suffered at the hands of the PS3. For most of the systems lifetime, they sold it at a loss. The Wii was never sold at a loss, and it sold way more units.

They can definitely compete in the hardcore market now, and I don't see a reason why they would not. I think we are going to see a big turnaround on what people think of the Nintendo after this comes out. I mention all the time how they are the undisputed king of the current generation and am met with boos and jeers. But, they make a killing and outsold every other console, I would say they won.

Reports put the Wii U at 50% more powerful than the PS3. Making it not all that comparable to the current gen, it should easily out do the PS3. On IGN a guy built a computer system comparable to the reports of what the Wii U has in it, and ran some cross platform games and showed them next to the PS3 version. In games not optimized for anything more powerful, it looked better across the board. And they built that computer for $425. Nintendo's system will probably run in the neighborhood of $250-$300, making them competitive with the current generation as it stands now.

In any event, I am optimistic. I own a PS3, a kick ass gaming PC that I build myself, and a Wii. Just as proof that I'm not just some dumb fanboy.

 

[Xanthious]

I think Sony is right. Nintendo got lucky with the Wii and it's crazy ass sales. That luck likely won't hold over for the WiiU. Casuals aren't going to spend the cost of another console to upgrade their Wii and all 2 games they have for it and Xbox/PS3 owners aren't going to want their gaming interrupted by the hassle of dealing with all of Nintendo's gimmicks. On top of that even if 360/PS3 owners weren't put off by gimmicks I don't think it's really that much of an upgrade to be worth making the jump over.