Nintendo trounces Sony in first round of console war

December 10, 2006 |

Nintendo trounces Sony in first round of console war

By John Pospisil

Make no mistake; the battle for next-generation console supremacy is as much about winning hearts and minds as it is about winning market share. So far, Nintendo has won both of these battles in its war against Sony, by not only producing a great product, but by also actually having it available and getting it into people’s hands.

Nintendo has so far sold around 1 million Wii consoles in the US and Japan, along with 100,000 units in Australia and Europe. It is well on track to reaching its target of 2 million units by the end of this calendar year. Meanwhile Sony has been plagued by manufacturing problems and has struggled to produce sufficient quantities of PlayStation 3s. Sony has sold just 500,000 units in the USA and Japan, and it’s goal of selling 2 million units by the end of this year just doesn’t seem to be realistic.

So what does all of this mean in the battle between Nintendo and Sony?

The Wii is available in more countries than the PS3
More than double the number of Wiis than PS3s are already out there
Sony is being perceived as incompetent for not being able to manage its supply chain to ensure that sufficient supplies of PS3 were available

A company’s marketing can only do so much during the launch of a new console. A lot of the real marketing is word-of-mouth, and at the moment the real word-of-mouth marketing is happening for Wii. People who have purchased the Wii will tell their friends, and at the moment there are more than double the number of Wii owners than there are PS3 owners talking about their new toys.

The big danger for Sony is that it never manages to catch up with Nintendo unit sales. The more units that are out there, the more games that are available, which in turn makes the console a more attractive proposition for new console buyers.

The big danger for Nintendo is that it doesn’t capitalize on Wii’s momentum. The GameCube may have curved out a niche market for itself, but the Wii is Nintendo’s opportunity to be a mainstream hit. It really needs to take advantage of this opportunity.

Personally, I’ve been impressed at how well Nintendo is doing against the mighty Sony. Nintendo’s last two efforts, the Nintendo 64 and GameCube, have been almost-rans compared with Sony and Microsoft’s offerings. Yet, the company has picked itself up, created a great product, and importantly, made sure that it had the manufacturing capacity to get the product out there. Mind you, the Wii launch has not been without a hitch, just check out Wiihaveaproblem.com to see the problems that Nintendo is having because the Wii’s game control/wand wrist strap keeps breaking, resulting in the game control slipping out of the player’s hand and smashing into things, such as big-screen televisions (doh!).

Yes it’s true that Sony has an amazing fan base, who will no doubt hang on to upgrade to the PS3 no matter what. But in not being able to supply demand during this launch period, and in being slow to launch into foreign markets, Sony has given Nintendo a once-in-a-generation opportunity to be a real player in the console game — just like it was in the good old days of the NES and SNES.