E3 07: Nintendo's Numbers
Today's Nintendo E3 press conference was quite the affair. Before he brought out the zapper, Reggie took a moment – more than a moment, really – to admire Nintendo’s shiny, all-encompassing veneer. The explosion of the game business (up 46% for the first five months of the year, compared to 2006) would be impossible without a substantially growing population of gamers.
Enter Nintendo’s well-deserved ego, and Reggie’s friendly number-supported pat on the back: over 60% of all game industry growth comes directly from the sales of Nintendo products, and both the overall market as well as Nintendo’s share are on the rise.
Whycome all the growth? First and foremost: portable systems. The DS market share alone comprises a full 25% of all game hardware sales in the United States.
Add to that considerable quarter the effect of expanding older and female audiences, about which we’ve heard plenty from Nintendo before, and you’ve got quite the pretty picture of a burgeoning gaming boomtown. In an environment where gamers above the age of 25 account for one-third of hardware sales and a quarter of North America’s game market entire, “expansion” is the word of the day.
While only 20% of the market is female, one-third of all systems bought by women are Nintendo products. That’s a ratio drop from 4:1 to 2:1! Or as Reggie put it: “That’s a lotta soccer moms!”
And thanks in part to those soccer moms, you can expect to see 100 games for the Wii launch before the holiday season, as well as a whopping 140 to come for the DS (bringing the DS library up to 440). Reggie summed it up well: “We are now facing a wonderful new reality: everyone’s a gamer.”
tiny dancer
Posted to E3, Hot Stuff on 11 July 2007
· Comments (2)
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While I'm glad to see more women gaming and all, "20% of the market is female" and "one-third of all systems bought by women are Nintendo" are totally apples and oranges and they doesn't reflect a ratio shift at all.
One-third of all systems bought by women could be Nintendo while simultaneously only making up 5% of Nintendo's market. All this tells us is that only 6.67% of the overall market consists of women buying Nintendo systems, and that the other guys have roughly the same female market share, maybe 6.67% each, maybe 10% Sony and 3% Microsoft or vice versa, but added together, another 13.33%.
And seriously, WTF? Two-thirds of the systems women buy are Sony or Microsoft? Still? In 2007? Is there some silent majority of Killzone and Halo fangrrls of which I'm unaware? I'd have thought Nintendo had their third of the female market back in the Gamecube/GBA days and that the number would have doubled by now at the expense of the pricier systems and PSP.
Didn't Reggie actually say that while 20% of the market is female, 33% of Nintendo market is female? I'd have to watch back the conference... Meh, too lazy!