7-9 Million Wiis by 2007?

Gamespot is reporting that Nintendo's production of the Wii is actually going better than expected. Analyst firm UBS is now estimating that 7-9 Million Wii units should be off the production lines by 2007. From the article: "Citing industry 'checks,' UBS analysts Alex Gauna and Steven Chin claim that Nintendo already made 2 million Wiis by the end of September. They go on to predict that, 'at least 7 million and potentially as high as 9 million more units are in the build plan for Q4 06. This production ramp handily exceeds a publicly announced target for 6 million units to ship by year's end.'"

Tis a Wii too many, but lots of fun

[WillAffleckUW]

Now if we could only get 300 million of them, and ship them all to the US, all our base could belong to us!

Any idea on how many games the 7-9 million Wiis will have? Are we looking at only 30 million, or will it break 100 million by the end of 2007?

Re:Might not be enough

[CastrTroy]

I think that they must be factoring in this. The Wii is supposed to be geared toward those who don't usually buy games, of course, while still satisfying the needs of the people who do game.

Re:Might not be enough

[rolfwind]

I think it does say something that geeks are anticipating the Wii. It was MS/Sony's expectation that us geeks, being more hardcore, would welcome the PS3 or perhaps the Xbox with welcome arms due to the horsepower alone.

And then we would spread the gospel to the Muggles in turn, providing free advertising/sale's drive to their consoles.

I know enough people still anticipate those systems, but it seems the Xbox 360 reception has been lukewarm and the Wii has turn the industry on it's head by not trying to compete in the areas Sony is exceedingly strong in, but rather playing to their own strengths.

In part, I see the PS3, with its Bluray encumbered/enable device, heading somewhat in the same direction as the Nintendo Gameboy VR and Sega Saturn, of years past. It will have success, however, but right now it seems Sony has to initiate most of its own hype, the PS3 will fail to launch Blu-ray as a defacto video standard, and probably fall short of the PS2 in terms of market domination.

Re:Might not be enough

[cowscows]

I was thinking about this last night. I remember a little bit of Atari gaming, but the bulk of what I clearly remember in my gaming career started with the NES. Since then, the industry has grown by leaps and bounds, the power of the hardware has increased at a stunning rate, and game development prices have continued to balloon.

But through all that, I still only seem to see about four or five must-have games in a given year. Despite all the advances in technology, making a great game appears to still be rather difficult. Maybe the technology has made it harder. I don't make games, so I'm not sure.

I'm certainly glad that graphics have improved. I'm excited to see what sorts of changes more realistic physics will allow in games. If AI gets better, that's awesome too. But don't think that it'll necessarily mean that the quality of games will improve overall.

I don't believe that there's a whole bunch of designers out there with these absolutely killer ideas for games, just waiting for the hardware to get powerful enough to make it reality. I still think that tetris is the best game I ever played, and it could run on a calculator that I had 10 years ago. Horsepower will only get you so far. You've got to have some inspired and dedicated designers making games, and as long as that's there, what you run it on doesn't matter so much.

There's no reason why a $250 system can't have games that are just as good as a $600 system, no matter how many pixels each one can render.

Actually, it is hard.

[LKM]

But it isn't hard to add a new controller after the fact

Actually, it is hard. I know of only one case where it worked: The Dual Shock on the original PS. And that one only worked because the new controller was a superset of the old one (it added the analog sticks) and because it came very early in the PS's life.

You can't just go ahead and replace the pack-in controller with something totally different. How would people play the old games with the new controller? You'd essentially fragment your customers. It would be like having two entirely different consoles. The only alternative is selling the new controller as a standalone item. That doesn't work either, because you won't sell a ton until there are lots of good games for the controller, and there won't be lots of good games for the controller unless you sell a ton. Look at the Cube Bongos, at the PS2 camera... Hell, look at the Power Glove.

How do you propose Sony would go about introducing a Wiimote clone for the PS3?

Re:Actually, it is hard.

[Leviance]

Its wishful thinking on his part. He's just a PS fanboy who hates to see another company win. The ideal solution for all gamers would be for the Wii to be successful, forcing M$ and S to either copy them (most likely) or better yet, come up with some innovations of their own. By all means I hope Sony does well, but it seems they have s___ed the pooch on this one.