Nintendo Still Pushes Ahead Of All The Rest Despite Price Shifts
Nintendo continues her march to world domination with the latest figures from the independent NPD Group. So far, the Wii has "emerged as the month's best-selling video game system of any type in the United States and achieved its highest weekly sales rates since December, despite pricing shifts in the industry," says NPD Group. Both the Wii and the Nintendo DS are still the two best-selling video game system in the U.S. with both of them outselling all other systems combined. Damn.
Of course, other figures lend Nintendo its current top dog position. For your pleasure, here they are:
- Nintendo remained the top U.S. game publisher for the sixth consecutive month.
- So far this year, Nintendo titles claim six of the industry's top 10 best sellers, including the top three: Pokemon® Diamond (overall No. 1) and Pokemon® Pearl (No. 3) for Nintendo DS, and Wii Play (No. 2) for Wii.
- Nintendo DS, with more than 300 titles available, has the largest game library for any current generation system.
- Wii has added new titles (averaging nine per month since launch) at a faster rate than any other new home system.
Congrats Nintendo, make us proud. It always makes me smile to see Nintendo back on top of the game (no pun intended).
Super Timsy
Posted to Video Games on 24 August 2007
· Comments (8)
Other stuff like this: Nintendo, NPD Group
Years of fanboyism seems to be paying off now. It'll be even more fun when Nintendo's big three come out.
Just don't let us down on the online play.
I always thought that loving Nintendo wasn't really fanboyism, it's just a fundamental truth. They started it all, and they're still the best.
Now if only they could get an exclusive deal with Square-Enix...
Do not worry. Nintendo will disappoint when it comes to online play. Wii is for casual only. I have one and play Everybody Votes all the time. Sorry not into tons of crappy mini-games and ports. I will get Mario Galaxy and Zelda for the DS. 360 is my hardcore gaming rig.
Nintendo may be adding an average of nine titles per month to the Wii's library of games, but next to none of them are of any great interest to the core gamer. With the meager exceptions of Metroid 3, NiGHTS, Mario Galaxy, and Resident Evil: The Umbrella Chronicles, the casual gaming route Nintendo is taking sadly comes at the price of displacing the hardcore gaming demographic. Let's hope Nintendo comes to realize that this is an unnecessary sacrifice, as the Wii has the potential to be an all-inclusive console system.
Quote: 'the casual gaming route Nintendo is taking sadly comes at the price of displacing the hardcore gaming demographic'
To be fair, making games for the core gamers do take a lot longer time than making casual gaming. I don't think Nintendo are sacrificing anything, and forgetting anyone, it's just that casual games are quicker and easier to create - hence more of them appears on the shelf.
Even Nintendo takes a long time as their main games arent even out yet! And Zelda happens to be 'finished' even before the console was released.
I admit, I'm glad they are on top again. :) I just didn't expect them to be this popular though.
First off, Nintendo didn't start it all.... Atari did. (Well, Philips actually did, but Atari made it popular.) Nintendo is merely the oldest survivor, and they'd have already lost this generation and possibly stopped making hardware if they hadn't tried something different. Atari and then Sega kept trying to win the hardware arms race and it cost them their businesses.
And for those of us who remember when "hardcore gamer" meant the annoying twerps who hung around the arcade for 8 hours a day playing Street Fighter 2, it wouldn't be sad at all if today's "hardcore gamers" were being "displaced". But Nintendo and the gaming industry in general isn't displacing hardcore gamers at all; they've just stopped ignoring the rest of us gamers who aren't in love with the color brown.
I don't care what the currently fashionable term is; no one who sits there playing the Sims or flash games or Animal Crossing for the entire day is a "casual gamer". They're just not into brown.
So I propose that we change the term "hardcore gamer" into "brown gamer".
My posting wasn't an attack on Nintendo, it simply stated my own personal concern for the lack of more "traditional" games on the Wii (a system that I proudly own) and wasn't intended to degenerate into a puerile arguement over symantics. Now, let's all play nice and get back to gaming...
My point was that there is no "sacrifice" being made at all, necessary or otherwise. Nintendo is still releasing more so-called "hardcore" games than so-called "casual" ones.
Even at E3, despite all the wounded fanboy howling, they were pushing one (1) "casual" game and four "hardcore" ones. Right now, there's a Metroid Prime 3 commercial airing in the US, Metroid being perhaps Nintendo's most "hardcore-friendly" franchise, and rather than be happy that Nintendo's catering to them, "core gamers" are whining on Internet message boards that the COMMERCIAL ITSELF is "too casual".
It's not a semantic thing at all, it's a real misconception on the part of the self-styled "hardcore" gamers.