The big story with video games these days is how Wii is dominating the competition. Sure, the XBox 360 is selling well and has sold over 8 million units, but Wii was launched only a few weeks ago and has sold over 1.2 million units worldwide.
That’s a crazy amount of Wii’s in a short amount of time!
These numbers, compared to the paltry 360,000 PlayStation 3 consoles sold show a very interesting story. With all of the horsepower and all of the hoopla around the PS3 debut, the system just isn’t that appealing to the gaming masses. But wait, you say. What about all of these people dying over PS3s and what about the fact that they’re sold out? Well, the biggest use of PS3s right now is NOT in people’s home – it’s reselling them. EBay is packed with PS3 packages and the game is sold out in the stores for this reason – people are buying the consoles simply to turn around and sell them.
While this is also happening with Wii, there are many more stories about how much fun the Nintendo system is – which means that people are buying the system and playing it, not reselling it. In any event, the recent surge of Wii sales shows the huge confusion that Microsoft and Sony have about video gamers.
Yes, there are gamers out there who will buy the PS3 and the XBox 360 because of the high definition graphics and the ability to watch high definition DVDs. And yes, there are people who will buy XBox 360 because of their enormous game library and who will buy PS3 just because it’s a PS3. But when you listen to what the marketing guys from Microsoft and Sony are saying to try to sell these systems, they’re completely confused.
Recently, one Sony employee said that the PS3 is on track to become so much more than a gaming machine. Well, that’s the problem! We don’t want to buy a video game system to do our daily e-mailing on – we want a video game machine that is a lot of FUN to play! Hell, we’ll even take graphics that aren’t that great if the game is fun! Don’t believe that? Go to any old-school arcade and tell me that you don’t love playing The Simpsons video game from the mid 1990’s. Or sit down with any PS2, GameCube, or XBox and tell me that playing a good Mortal Kombat or Sonic the Hedgehog or Final Fantasy game isn’t sweet.
That’s what gamers want – FUN! You can keep your “home entertainment centers” – we already have a desktop or laptop PC!
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