Halfway through the year the console scoreboard reads almost exactly opposite to how everybody expected it to read, and the gap between prediction and outcome is worth being explicit about.
Nintendo is winning and cannot build machines fast enough. Seven months after launch the Wii is still hard to find, which is not a launch shortage any more, it is a manufacturing decision or a demand curve nobody modelled. The software situation remains thin and the shovelware is arriving on schedule, and neither has slowed the hardware down at all.
Microsoft is second and comfortable. The library is deep, the online service works, and the Halo beta has kept several hundred thousand people occupied through a quiet spring. The reliability stories have not gone away and I still think that bill has not been fully presented.
Sony is third, which is a sentence I would not have written eighteen months ago about any market this company competed in. Europe got its consoles four months late into a library that was thin when I described it in February and is only slightly less thin now. The price remains the price.
What I got wrong was not the ranking, it was the mechanism. I assumed Nintendo’s risk was that people would buy the machine, play tennis for a fortnight and stop. Seven months in, they may well have stopped, and it has not mattered, because the people who have not bought one yet keep trying to. The shortage is doing the work that word of mouth would otherwise have to do.
What everybody got wrong, collectively, was assuming this was one market. Two of these companies are selling to people who read about consoles, and the third is selling to households that were not in the category at all. Measuring them against each other on a single chart makes the chart wrong rather than Nintendo exceptional.
The second half of the year is where the real test sits. Halo arrives in the autumn and will move a very large number of Microsoft consoles. Sony’s first-party studios finally start shipping, which is the point at which the machine either justifies itself or does not. Nintendo has to demonstrate that it has software to sell to fifteen million households, and it has never had to operate at that scale on that schedule before.
My guess is that Christmas produces three companies all able to claim a good year, and that Sony’s claim will be the weakest and the most improved. I would not put money on any of it.