Market analysts on the impressive performance of Nintendo Wii

Market analysts on the impressive performance of Nintendo Wii

Nintendo Wii has become the talking point in the video gaming industry. The innovative gaming console has been the fastest selling of the three next generation products from the three giants in the industry and this has resulted in several opinions from the market analysts.

Kaufman Bros. Equity Research analyst Todd Mitchell was recently quoted as saying that the success of the Nintendo Wii was bad for the video gaming industry in general. He said: “Nintendo’s success with the DS and Wii bodes poorly for the publishers. Nintendo is dominating software sales on its popular hardware platforms, leaving the publishers with a smaller slice of an only somewhat incrementally larger pie.”

He further said: “We feel that the likely shorter product cycles of Nintendo’s platforms puts the publishers in a permanent catch-up mode.”

Now, Wedbush Morgan analyst Michael Pachter has responded to this particular statement. Pachter said: “Going forward, the publishers are all trying to be largely platform agnostic. The success of the Wii and DS means that virtually every mainstream title will appear on both platforms. If consumers have a choice of all games on the Wii and DS, and Nintendo’s offering remains constant, Nintendo must lose share. That is a good thing for the third party publishers.”

He further argued that: “His conclusion is that Nintendo’s success on the GameCube and GBA will translate to future success on the DS and Wii, so he’s basing his opinion on a view that Nintendo will capture somewhere around 30 per cent market share on each of its new consoles. This is naive. I expect that Nintendo’s first party share will decline from around 30 per cent last cycle to around 20 per cent this cycle, and that many publishers trying to capture market share will succeed.”