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Posts Tagged ‘Nintendo Wii’

Nintendo, Microsoft claw back on top in US gaming sales

January 2010 didn’t beat January 2009 in consumer spending, with hardware sales down 21 percent, and software sales down 12 percent. Peripheral sales, however, are up two percent! Let’s grab onto that tiny bit of good news and allow it to float us to safety.

January was an overall calm month for game sales, with no major surprises. The Nintendo Wii and DS sold the best, and Nintendo put the most software on the top ten list. Microsoft rallied after coming in behind the PlayStation 3 in December, soundly beating Sony’s system last month. Let’s take a look at the numbers.

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Week in gaming: Dark Void review, Wii maturity, and GT5

This week we reviewed the much-anticipated jet pack-enabled title Dark Void, we looked at the chances of Mature-rated games on the Nintendo Wii, took a look at the latest delay of Gran Turismo 5, and talked to the developer of MAG about how to get people to work together online. Oh, and we have an interview with the creative lead of a little game called Bioshock 2.

Here’s your week in gaming.

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Looking back at 2009 console sales and ahead to 2010 trends

The final tally for console sales in the US for December was telling, but how did Sony, Microsoft, and Nintendo perform for the entire year? Let’s take a look at how each system did on a month-to-month basis to find out.

Data Source: NPD Group

It’s quite a picture, isn’t it? There were skirmishes every month, and you can certainly see the price drops: check out the PS3 September market share. In fact, Sony’s redesign and $300 price point, along with a little game called Uncharted 2 getting Game of the Year from a good selection of publications, allowed Sony to have quite the end of the year.

The Nintendo DS stayed well above everyone else for the majority of the year, while the Nintendo Wii actually dipped below the PS3 in September. Check out the Christmas sales though, and the “Nintendo is a fad and only kids buy it” argument fails. Yes, you may know someone who doesn’t play their Wii anymore, but keep in mind Microsoft or Sony would kill for the type of consumer behavior we’re seeing in the sales numbers. 

The 360 has been in a tight race with the PS3 all year, and Sony eked ahead in the end. Again, price sells consoles, and a system with a Blu-ray player and some very compelling exclusives for $300 is hard to turn down. Microsoft does great things for its third-party developers, but unfortunately the system may not be as sexy right now as its competitors. Will Natal change that this time next year? We can’t wait to find out.

Finally, let’s take a look at the final sales information for the year. That should show you just how powerful Nintendo’s hold on gaming has become. 

Data Source: NPD Group; data for US only

It doesn’t get any clearer than that. Microsoft and Sony will continue to fight for a distant second place in console sales in 2010, and Nintendo will continue to do what it does best this generation: make an insane amount of money. We’ve already seen Ubisoft all but admit it couldn’t make money on Nintendo hardware, so 2010 will be in interesting case study in what happens when one company changes the game so definitively. Will third-parties double-down on the 360 and PS3, or will they try again to make a dent in the lucrative Wii and DS market?

This year should prove to be a bumpy one for everyone involved.

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Nintendo Wii Supreme is topped with a layer of gold, sprinkled with diamonds, and priced at £300,000
Inventing a new echelon in Engadget’s Holiday Gift Guide, Stuart Hughes has managed to Supreme-ize a Nintendo Wii, covering it in over 2,500 grams of solid 22 carat gold and an aggregate total 19.5 carats of flawless diamonds for the three front buttons. Three have been made and were done so reportedly over the span of six months. Asking price is £299,995, or about $484,818 in US dollars, which if you go by Kotaku’s admittedly unprofessional estimations is about $200,000 in raw materials and the rest in labor / profit. The only to make this sound reasonable is if we compared it alongside a $3.2 million iPhone 3GS, and what do ya know, that was also a Stuart Hughes creation. We’re gonna take a stab in the dark and say that Wii Sports is not included.

Nintendo Wii Supreme is topped with a layer of gold, sprinkled with diamonds, and priced at £300,000 originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 18 Dec 2009 02:17:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Tiny mirrors fuel smartphones with video projectors

Two new gadgets debuting this week show off the video projection capabilities of the digital light processing chips made by Texas Instruments.

The LG eXpo smartphone has a TI-based DLP Pico projector attachment, allowing the $179 phone to show movies, videos or a slide show on a blank wall or white surface.

Brightboxe also introduced a multimedia/gaming DLP projector in Target stores in Southern California. The projector works with game consoles such as the Sony PlayStation 2 and PlayStation 3, the Microsoft Xbox 360, and the Nintendo Wii. The $199 projector has a native 480p DVD resolution and a 500:1 contrast ratio. You never need to replace its lamp as you do with other projectors. It can show images ranging from 60 inches to 100 inches.

Both devices use the TI technology, which consists of chips with millions of micro-machined mirrors on top of them that reflect light to create sharp video imagery. TI engineer Larry Hornbeck invented DLP in 1987. The chips contain 2 million mirrors, each of which is a fifth the size of a human hair. The mirrors are set on hinges and can switch on or off several thousand times per second.

The 1.8-ounce LG phone can project a crystal-clear image up to 60 inches in size. That means you can use your phone to share pictures, videos, and even make presentations to small groups.

These devices are engineering marvels and could generate a new market for TI’s DLP chips, which used to form the backbone of rear-projection TV sets. But flat-panel TVs have pretty much killed off that market. Here’s a link to a video of the Brightboxe product.

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Foxconn To Launch Retail Stores In China

Taiwan-headquartered Foxconn, the world’s largest electronics manufacturer, will launch up to 10,000 consumer electronics retail stores in China, says China Daily. Until now they have not had a significant retail brand or presence.

What will they sell? Probably some of the many products that they build for well known brands, including the iPhone, iPod, iMac, Sony Playstation, Sony Vaio notebooks, Amazon Kindle, Nokia phones and Nintendo Wii.

But part of the plan, we’ve heard from an independent source, will be to use the retail presence in China to win manufacturing business as well. HP, Dell and others can move more of their business to Foxconn, along with a promise to get retail presence for their electronics in the Foxconn stores in China.

Foxconn exports $55.6 billion of electronics from their factories in China, says the article, or about 3.9% of China’s total exports. And that number may be lowballed. Our sources say no one outside of Foxconn even knows the real size of their exports, and that $100 billion/year or more is the street rumor in Asia.

Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.

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Playing Around With Ball-it’s Ridiculously Cool Wireless Gaming Device (Video)
Yours truly was in Finland most of last week, visiting a bunch of technology startups at their offices, paying a visit to Nokia’s research center and attending the great MindTrek conference (thanks again for organizing the tour, FinnFacts).

One of the items in the packed schedule was a visit to the Demola facilities, essentially a type of incubator where students from the three universities in the city of Tampere and beyond can come work on projects in an ‘open innovation environment’.

One of the demos there that made a lasting impression on me – and the other bloggers who were invited to the tour – came from startup Ball-it. The fledgling company markets a golfball-sized device that is able to interact with your computer, TV or mobile phone thanks to physical wireless sensing technology that was popularized in large part by the Nintendo Wii gaming console. The technology has been under development for quite a while; tech blog Venturebeat profiled Ball-it about 10 months ago.

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Nintendo finally confirms $199 price for the Wii game console

Rumors of a Nintendo Wii price cut have been swirling since Microsoft and Sony cut the prices on their game consoles in September and August.

Now Nintendo has finally confirmed that it is cutting the price of the Wii from $249 to $199. It took a while to react, but Nintendo hasn’t been under much pressure to match its rivals.

That’s because of the enormous popularity of the Wii. In any given month in the past, Nintendo could count on selling twice as many Wiis as its rivals combined. That’s why the company kept the price of the Wii at $249 since its introduction of the new hardware in the fall of 2006. That’s an unprecented length of time for no hardware price cut.

But Nintendo played the strategy right. While Sony’s PlayStation 3 came out at the outrageous price of $599 in 2006, and the Xbox 360 debuted at $399 in 2005, Nintendo priced its Wii console at a much more affordable price. It already had its hooks in the mass market audience at the get go, while the others played the game of cutting prices over time until the mass market could afford. Now that the PS 3 Slim and the Xbox 360 are priced at $299 each and they’re starrting to stir up better hardware sales, Nintendo is reacting.

Nintendo has also had to pay attention to sales this year. The Wii’s sales have flattened, and for six months now, Wii sales have not beaten year ago sales. Lots of consumers have been waiting for Nintendo to make a move. But it seemed like Nintendo was milking profits due to the Wii’s popularity. That’s a dangerous game to play, but it’s good to see that Nintendo is interesting in pumping new life into the recession-stagnated console video game market.

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