Road said:
Thanks for making clear to me why we should focus on the PSP decline.
Who knew it was so easy? Let's discuss how the PSP is having a 40% decline in its 5th year and is still outperforming everyone but the DS.
I can see that we are looking at it from different angles. If you want to put qualifiers on the terms, then of course, feel free to use whichever qualifiers work best for you. I'm trying to look at it in the simple terms of the overall Japanese video game market.
Let's just look at the systems currently being tracked by the sales trackers. We won't even bother going back to the GBA, PS1, GB/GBC, SNES, NES, etc. Which combined had a whole slew of years better than the PSP and Wii had in 2009. And I'll ignore launch years since those are usually only one or two months of sales anyway, except for the PS2 which launched in March.
- The DS outsold this year's PSP 5 out of 5 years. (Same for this year's Wii.)
- The PSP outsold this year's PSP 2 out of 4 years. (4 out of 5 years for this year's Wii) (I'm assuming that the PSP will sell at least 150k and the Wii at least 295k over the last two weeks of the year for this calculation. If either fails to happen, then add one to the appropriate number)
- The PS3 outsold this year's PSP 0 out of 3 years. (Same for this year's Wii.) (I'm assuming the Wii will hold on YTD, but if cvxfreak's 400k estimate pans out, then it will be 1 out of 3 years vs, this year's Wii)
- The 360 outsold this year's PSP 0 out of 4 years. (Same for this year's Wii)
- The PS2 outsold this year's PSP 6 out of 10 years. (Same for this year's Wii)
- The Wii outsold this year's PSP 2 out of 3 years. (2 out of 2 for this year's Wii)
So adding up the numbers, we get:
15 out of 29 systems outsold this year's PSP.
17 out of 29 systems outsold this year's Wii.
Depending on how sales pan out over the final two weeks this year, those numbers may fluctuate +/- 1. But you get the picture.
Ranking the systems currently on the market year by year, this year's Wii and PSP are both firmly in the middle of the pack.
Looking at it from a macro level, neither system did particularly good or particularly bad this year in historical terms for the Japanese market. They were both rather pedestrian, or average, or middling. Personally, I've always tried to use the term mediocre when describing the Wii and PSP this year. There's not a lot of difference between them. They have very similar sales this year, one ahead a bit in hardware, the other ahead in software. Both experienced similar steep drops from the previous year. Both still sold to pretty much the same types of gamers that they sold to the previous year. I fail to see how one system could be considered to have had a good year, while the other had a bad year.
Unless of course, someone wants to start applying qualifiers to the discussion. The PSP had a good year considering it has been on the market five years and had no new million sellers this year. The Wii had a good year considering how awful 3rd-party support has been for the system. The PS2 had a good year considering it was released a decade ago. The 360 had a good year considering it performed better than all other XBox systems in Japan. Of course, from a purely market level perspective, the 360 and PS2 had horrible years. (But there's no shame in that for the PS2. Systems that have been on the market for 10 years are supposed to have bad years. It is mightily impressive that the PS2 is still on the market at all after all this time. But from a market perspective, it had a bad year, and performed well below several other systems.)
Anybody can find a qualifier to make anything look like it had a good or bad year based upon a particular qualifier. But when trying to look at the numbers this year in a neutral fashion in terms of the actual market performance, there isn't a whole lot to separate the year that the Wii and PSP had. And that comparison becomes even more similar when this year's performance is judged relative to last year's performance.
Anyway, I hope that helps clear up where I'm coming from.
charlequin said:
We actually had a conversation almost exactly like this around... two months ago maybe? where someone was like "hey, did you notice the PSP is sucking it up right now?" and a whole bunch of us were like "holy shit, you're right." :lol
I don't think it really went much farther than that because unlike with the Wii I don't think people really had much to disagree with about why the PSP was sucking it up now, but yeah, the PSP is definitely sucking it up.
(Personally, I harsh a lot on the Wii this year because I was such a huge advocate of it at launch and have spent so much time describing the strategies that I believed could have made it much more successful than it is -- plus I made all kinds of dire warnings years ago that I feel the need to establish I was correct about now. :lol With the PSP I really never expected it to be successful as anything other than "the Monhan box.")
Ha ha. Yeah, I remember that. I think it was either Schuelma or myself who initiated that prior conversation. But as you said that was maybe 2 or 3 months ago. I guess I was hoping that it could put an end to the conversation for a while, but then we spent the last 2 or 3 months once more going week after week with "Wii is fucked" and "Wii is doomed", etc. But again without any mention whatsoever of the PSP, which has had just as rough of a year as the Wii, and which has actually been performing quite a bit worse than the Wii YOY over the course of the last several months.
But you're right. It was discussed before, so I'm really just reiterating old stuff. So I'll just let it go.
I probably shouldn't be, but for some reason I am amazed at just how myopic this board can be sometimes. I'm not referring to anyone in particular, or any system in particular (it applies pretty much across the spectrum depending on the circumstances) but in general, this board can put on some awfully thick blinders when it comes to some sales topics. Which I guess keeps surprising me, because there are a good number of very intelligent and thoughtful people who post in these sales topics.
cvxfreak said:
There is absolutely zero comparison in terms of availability between the two. The availability of the Lightning PS3 vastly outnumbers the MH3 Wii pack.
Everyone here probably remembers that I was photographed by Famitsu during the MH3/Black Wii launch. But in actuality, I had initially gone into the store to get the bundle. There was a stack of them (maybe around 50 units), but they were all pre-ordered through. So, I settled for the standalone unit, and was photographed for it. Had I gotten the bundle, I probably would not have been photographed.
I keep hearing there were perhaps 20K MH3 Wii bundles. That makes sense, especially seeing Wii HW sales that week. Can the Lightning bundle be 10x that? It's possible. 100K is at least a given by now.
Speaking of bundles, I think SW3 is pretty much gone from stores, and the Graces bundle is dwindling.
Thanks for the comments, cvxfreak. That's exactly what I was looking for.
