The Wii has been on sale for two months, it is still not reliably available in shops, and I am now fairly confident I was wrong about the part I was most worried about.
What I said in November was that selling out at launch tells you nothing, because every console sells out at launch, and that the real question was what a household plays in February. Two months in, the shortage has not eased, which is a different pattern from the usual one. Normal launch scarcity resolves in six to eight weeks as the channel refills. This has not resolved, and the resale market has stayed active well past the point where it usually collapses.
That does not prove people are still playing. It does suggest demand is coming from somewhere other than the population that preordered, which was the specific thing I doubted.
The anecdotal evidence is the part I find hardest to dismiss, and I am aware that anecdote is not data. Everybody has now been in a room where somebody who has never held a controller played tennis for twenty minutes. That does not happen with any other console and it has not happened in this industry for a very long time. Nintendo built a machine whose entire pitch can be delivered in four seconds without instructions, and the pitch is landing on people the industry had written off.
Where I remain unconvinced is the second purchase. Wii Sports came in the box, and the evidence that anybody is buying a third or fourth game is thin. Twilight Princess sold well and it sold to Nintendo’s existing audience, the people who were always going to buy a Zelda. The interesting number, which nobody is publishing, is how many software titles the average Wii household owns compared with the average 360 household. My guess is that the gap is embarrassing and that Nintendo is not in a hurry to correct anybody’s impression.
Meanwhile Sony is having the year I expected it to have. The PlayStation 3 is expensive, supply is constrained for reasons that are Sony’s own fault rather than the market’s, and European buyers are still waiting for March. Microsoft is quietly selling consoles to people who wanted a Wii and could not find one, which is the most useful position in this market and one it did nothing to earn.
The thing I keep turning over is whether the industry learns the right lesson from this. The wrong lesson, which is the one it will learn, is that motion control sells consoles, and we will spend the next three years watching every publisher bolt waggle onto games that did not need it. The right lesson is that there was an enormous audience nobody was serving because the entire industry had agreed that games were for people who already played games.
Two months is not long enough to call a generation. What it is long enough to say is that a machine with no high definition output, a weaker processor than either competitor and a controller everybody mocked in September is currently the hardest console in the world to buy, and that the people who explained why that could not happen, myself partly included, should probably sit with it for a while.