At the Nintendo World store in New York City's Rockefeller Center, shipments arrive nightly. In the wee hours customers begin lining up around the block. Doors open at nine, and a few hours later the consoles are gone. In the world's gadget epicenter, Tokyo's Akihabara district, shopkeepers complain about the lack of inventory. Wii displays are covered with SOLD OUT signs, while piles of PlayStation3 boxes carry a different message: 5 percent OFF. Even the Nintendo of America company store near Seattle sees lines of employees, visitors and contractors. Forget about lucking into a Wii at your local Best Buy (Charts, Fortune 500). It's not unusual for a new game console to sell out during its pre-Christmas introduction, only to see sales dwindle come January. But six months after the Wii's launch, sales are accelerating. Nintendo sold 360,000 boxes in the U.S. in April, 100,000 more than in March. That's two Wiis for every Xbox 360 and four for every PlayStation3. While Sony (Charts) and Microsoft (Charts, Fortune 500) lose money on hardware in hopes of seeding the market with their consoles, analysts say Nintendo makes about $50 on every unit. It may not sound like much, but the company plans to sell 35 million of these things over the next few years. That's $1.75 billion in potential profit. Add that to the ridiculous earnings from the company's handheld gaming device, the Nintendo DS, as well as software sales and licensing revenue, and you begin to understand why Nintendo's market cap just passed $45 billion, an all-time high. (Nintendo (Charts) trades on the Tokyo and Kyoto stock exchanges and as an ADR in the U.S.) More difficult to comprehend is how a company founded 118 years ago as a maker of playing cards in Kyoto came to be pummeling Microsoft and Sony. The answer has something to do with reinvention. http://money.cnn.com/magazines/fort...83454/index.htm
Re: Ninendo Pulls Ahead Great they are making money on something that costs less then a part in the X360 and PS3 and has only 5% of the cpu/gpu power. Shame the only game most poeple buy for there Wii is just wii sports.
Re: Ninendo Pulls Ahead You're a youngster aren't you JUSTLEE? I'm guessing born in the late 80's, aged about 17 or 18 now. It's the missing word "again" in the thread title that makes me think this.
Re: Ninendo Pulls Ahead While Sega did well with the Master System in Europe, and the Megadrive/Genesis worldwide the NES and to a lesser degree SNES were immensely popular.
Re: Ninendo Pulls Ahead I'm glad Nintendo is making a comeback. Sony has owned the industry for too long now.
Re: Ninendo Pulls Ahead xbox started to take away from it with halo and halo 2. I never liked the playstation. I was nintendo until the 'cube, then I went XBOX and now I'm back to the wii. I think this is the first time where I ACTUALLY want two out of the 3 competing consoles. I want the 360 for Halo 3 and Guitar Hero 2, and I want the Wii for the sheer awesomeness of the motion sensor. Usually it's just one since I never cared for sega or sony much (the genesis was great, don't get me wrong, I had a genesis and saturn but I didn't want them as bad as nintendo's consoles)
Re: Ninendo Pulls Ahead Sony's feeling the force of the market. They have been so arrogant and stupid that they deserve everything they get now. It's almost like they stopped doing market research or they would have known that nobody gives a hoot about having a 'supercomputer' in their living room when you can get more fun for less than half the price. I mean - would be nice to have that power for 3D rendering, but all you can do with the thing is play. And with the HD-DVDs not really being the explosive product they made us think it would be, there really is no reason to spend that kind of money. It's not even got the cool factor.
Re: Ninendo Pulls Ahead The Wii has been ahead in sales for several months now. Nintendo pulled ahead quite a while ago.
Re: Ninendo Pulls Ahead I can see why they went this route, it's what worked a few years ago with the PS3 wiping out the Dreamcast in hype when it launched with all the hoopla about it being a cruise missile powering supercomputer and the like. This article also seems to be referring to Nintendos market value on the Japanese stock exchange reached an all time high. Hell a few weeks ago for a few hours Nintendo was valued at more than Sony (that's all of Sony, not just the videogame division)
Re: Ninendo Pulls Ahead Wii isn't that much fun after the magic of the wiimote wears off. It just doesn't work that well, it's only good to use if you got some friends over and had a few drinks.
Re: Ninendo Pulls Ahead I tried looking around for a Wii for my brother's birthday. The Target I work at had them in that same flipping morning and somehow sold out by noon. I've always liked Nintendo's games better than any other console (my brother and cousins have Xbox and PS2, respectfully). Grew up on the N64, then GameCube, and even if I don't get a Wii for my brother, I'll eventually want this system for myself.
Re: Ninendo Pulls Ahead I tend to enjoy video games the most when playing them with friends, be it Gears of War, Guitar Hero, DOA 4, etc, etc. When I think of playing video games by myself, I just can't help but feel a little sad and pathetic.
I've never gotten that, drinking and playing games. I can see playing things like Mario Party and maybe Smash Bros., but anything else and I would end up getting very frustrated with my teammate. Of course, I play a lot of games that require a sober attention span and thought process and ones that are generally not multiplayer.
I played Halo while I was high once...I just stood my character in the middle of the room and kept spinning and spinning, thinking it was so AWESOME that the toggle switch could do that. Of course, that made me an easy target for my sober buddies
/agree Though, I've played a lot of games baked outta my skull and still enjoy them. Just don't play any RPGs that way, because you usually forget every single objective.
The most complicated RPG I play is Crono Trigger and considering I go through it every year or so, it's not that complicated anymore. Same goes for Earthbound and FFII & III. And there is nothing so much fun in the world as a drunken/high Duckhunt tourniment.
Re: Ninendo Pulls Ahead Yep. If you want super-advanced graphics at high resolutions, the 360 and PS3 are vastly inferior to the PC. Basically, they don't have much going for them. There's just... madden 2007, 2008, 2009 etc... and other sports franchises. Oh and these same titles come out of last gen consoles (and the PC) as well.
A friend brought a Wii along and we all played it after getting back from hitting the local microbrew... That shit is fun. We played bowling on Wii Sports and it was really fun. I even had fun watching him play Zelda for about an hour. It's just... fun! I would definitely purchase one. Xbox live is really frustrating as it only works half the time and I wonder if the Wii does online multiplayer any better.
Wii online multiplayer quite frankly sucks at the moment, there are only a couple of games that use it. Things will get better, but it is an area where Nintendo is definitely in no rush unfortunately.
I dropped by my cousins house the other day because I was in the area and we all have keys to each other's houses so I just walked right in and I hear people in the living room playing the Wii and getting all loud and in to it but it doesn't sound like my cousins and I turn the corner to see my aunt and my step mother playing Mario Party. Thing is they didn't hear me come in and they had the whole deer in the head lights look and I give them a kinda "So...... ..what's going on" sort of thing - Funniest moment ever.
I dislike playing X-Box live sometimes because a lot of the people who play are, frankly, monster players. I don't play often enough to be super-good at ANY game besides maybe Guitar Hero 2, and on that I'm simply somewhere between average and above-average. On most other games, I'm average or below. So, I usually get my ass kicked. Which is fine when I'm with friends, cause I laugh about it. But it gets annoying when I'm playing on a server, and some little 12-year-old is cackling about getting a head-shot on me in Halo. It's annoying, and really detracts from the fun of it. Especially since I set my "group" to "casual" or whatever it is, specifically to avoid little shits like that.
