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Pachter Says Publishers Are Jumping Off Wii Bandwagon
Wedbush Morgan Securities’ Michael Pachter always has an opinion. Whether it’s about software sales or that shirt you’re wearing (seriously, you might want to rethink that), he’s always here to analyze. After predicting gloomy growth for the game industry last month, today Pachter cast his gaze to Wii software sales, and what he sees is trouble.
Despite the fact that the console is still selling, software sales for Wii were down 19 percent from last year at this time. In comparison, PS3 software sales were up 58 percent and Xbox 360 sales were up 29 percent (DS sales were also down 13 percent). The Wii’s installed base is actually up 44 percent from last year, which points out a disturbing trends: More consoles in the hands of consumers is not translating into game sales.
The result? Third party publishers seem to be reducing their support for the system. Pachter comments:
“Software attach rates for the Wii continue to decline, and publishers appear to be reluctant to support the console as broadly as the other two, notwithstanding its huge lead in installed base. We think that Nintendo will continue to dominate sales on its console, with its first-rate lineup of games, but fear that other publishers have prematurely abandoned the very large Wii audience, and see further year-over-year software sales declines for the Wii for the next several months. These declines will make year-over-year industry sales growth difficult to achieve."
These statistics seem to confirm what many of us have long suspected is true: Wii owners buy less games, and the ones they do buy tend to come from a very small pool of hugely successful, Nintendo-published titles like New Super Mario Bros. and Wii Fit. While nothing seems to be able to slow the sales of the console itself, an attrition of quality software could eventually lead to the decline of the Wii.
[Via Industry Gamers]
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