14 DAY TRIAL // It is no longer a huge surprise: Nintendo's Wii console has great sales and it keeps beating the crap out of the other two main competitors, aimed at the more hardcore gamers - Sony's PlayStation 3 and Microsoft's Xbox 360. What we could call interesting, though, is the fact that analysts consider that the good sales of the Wii won't stop too soon.
Speaking to gamedaily.com, analyst Daniel Ernst of Hudson Square Research predicted that the Wii will outsell the Xbox 360 and PS3 consoles combined, and that the DS is a runaway success. For the last fiscal year (that just ended this March), Sony sold 9 million PS3 units globally, Microsoft sold 9.5 million Xbox 360s and Nintendo sold 18.5 million Wiis. For the next fiscal year, Ernst forecasts that Microsoft will sell 11.2 million units of the Xbox 360 worldwide, Sony will sell 12.5 million PS3s and Nintendo will sell 23 million Wiis.
"Microsoft got the jump on the industry with a one-year headstart, but nine months after its the launch, the Nintendo Wii overtook the Xbox 360 on a global basis. While the PS3, has struggled out of the gate, we note that since last fall, the console has been outselling the Xbox 360 in Europe, and in the first two months of this year has even outsold the Xbox 360 on its home turf, in the U.S. (In Japan, overtaking the Xbox 360 was almost immediate). With its strong slate of software scheduled for the coming year, we expect a material acceleration for the PS3 this year, but we believe the Wii will sell more than the PS3 and Xbox 360 combined this year," he said for Gamedaily.
Also, he thinks that the Nintendo DS will still dominate the portable console market and the low production costs for DS games (about $1M compared to $15M to $30M for a next-gen console game) might turn the console into a huge profit generator for the next fiscal year.
On the other hand, recent results have shown the the PlayStation Portable managed to outsell the DS console last month in Japan, which might be just the beginning of a new era. Should this happen in the console war, too, we'll definitely going to get an angry Mario and co. by the end of 2009.