Lately, I’ve been neglecting coverage of the video game industry on this blog. I think that since I’ve become a casual gamer (like most people in their late 20’s and older) and began looking at video game publishers more as companies to invest in versus companies to buy games from, I just haven’t followed the industry as much. I do go looking around one video game site the other day just to see what was going on with the Nintendo Wii and there were no big surprises.
The Wii still dominates the market with 48.5 million units sold worldwide which is almost double the nearest competition. XBox 360 comes in second with some 29.5 million units worldwide with PlayStation 3 bringing in the caboose at 21.3 million units worldwide. And in terms of handheld units, forget about it. The Nintendo DS has over 100 million units sold worldwide, which is more than double the PSP. It’s not even worth calling a competition any more in that segment of the market.
I read an update about the Wii now being able to handle up to 32GB smart disks and a change in the core technology to allow users to download software directly to their smart disks. That’s a welcome relief for many gamers who were running up against the internal limits of their Wii machines and other gamers who went out and purchased smart disks when they bought their system and have had yet to use them! It always seemed odd to me that the smart disk technology would be so ready available for use with the Wii, but that there would be no game-specific uses for it upon the system’s launch. Talk about a dumb move – but at least it’s been fixed now.
And apparently there are going to be more Final Fantasy downloads coming from the WiiWare system thanks to Square-Enix’s support for this feature. That can only be welcome news as there will always be a void in Nintendo’s line-up with no first-run games from the core Final Fantasy story.
Anyway, just thought I’d share some information that I picked up when running around the website linked above. Enjoy!
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