Editorial: Nintendo Heading Towards Disaster

Jordan Lund sees disaster in the future for Nintendo, due to their inability to sell games.

Excerpt: "Out of 774 listed Wii titles, only 67 of them have sold a million copies or more. On a platform with a built in audience of 60 million players. That’s not even the half of it. Get this: 396 of those 774 titles sold 100,000 copies or less. Put another way, 51% of Wii games are completely ignored by 99.83% (or more) of their potential audience. An audience that keeps growing by the day.

So where are the games being bought? Both the Xbox 360 and the PlayStation 3 are seeing gains in terms of hardware sales and software sales. 360 software market share is up 9% from last year, that’s almost double the 5% in hardware growth they’ve seen this year. PS3 market share has increased 4%, which doesn’t seem like a lot compared to the 360, but it’s far better than the 5% loss in share that the Wii experienced.

I’ve said from the beginning that the Wii platform is a soccer mom driven fad and when that fad implodes (as did Cabbage Patch Dolls, Tickle Me Elmo and Beanie Babies) what you’re left with is an audience which doesn’t like games, doesn’t buy games and doesn’t play games. That’s exactly the pattern we’re seeing. When the tale of the Wii is written and people ask "What happened? How did we go from selling 60 million pieces of hardware with no software?" the answer will be "You targeted people who don’t play games.""