The Little Wii That Could

August 1st, 2007 • 1 comment Business, Design, Gaming

According to Japanese games magazine publisher Enterbrain, the Wii is pounding the PS3 four to one in Japan.

Nintendo sold 396,752 units of the Wii in the five weeks ended July 29, compared with 91,987 units of the PS3.

Nintendo Wii outsells Sony’s PS3 in Japan in July - Yahoo! News

This should come as no shock, and there’s a lesson in the Wii’s success that other product manufacturers and marketers should heed. The Wii is not a product - it is delightful. Yes, you buy it as you would any product, and you take it out of its box as you would any other product. But from there on in, the Wii becomes something else.

In its own small way, the Wii has changed how we deal with each other as a family. We all have our own Mii characters (yep, that includes 44-year-old me). The Wii sees more action in a week than our XBox360 sees in a month. Yes, it’s usually the kids that switch it on, but there’s invariably an adult in on the action with two minutes.

The graphics are poor compared with the 360 (and the PS3, from what I’m told), but that fact was only mentioned once by me, and has never been mentioned again.

From the Bisto ads to the Facebook boom, I reckon we’re seeing a steady shift from solo digital to social analogue. The 360 is bulky, powerful and cutting edge - but for all its multiplayer capabilties, I’d wager that most games are played alone. The Wii is intensely social: if it had a noise naturally associated with it, it would be laughter.

A copy of Resident Evil 5 for the Wii recently made its way into the house. It was wrong: a zombie thrasher had no place alongside Mario and bowling. You kill zombies alone, getting something off your chest that - if we’re honest - probably shouldn’t be there in the first place.

Wired editor turns on Second Life

July 30th, 2007 • Gaming, Social

Wired’s esteemed editor Chris Anderson has lost faith in Second Life, having thrown himself in a presence in the hyped virtual world - including a book signing, and the production of an SL ‘travel guide‘. Why?

Well, partly it was the whole “there’s nobody there” problem, which is of course just anecdotal. Like everyone else, I had fun exploring the concept and marveling at all the creativity. Then I got bored, and I started marveling at something else: all the empty corporate edifices. By day I’d speak at marketing conferences that usually had someone pitching SL services, complete with staged demonstrations (the “inhabitants” invariably paid employees). By night I’d go back to the same places, which had reverted to ghost towns once the demonstration was over. I couldn’t understand why companies kept throwing money at in-world presences. Were they seeing something I wasn’t?

The Long Tail: Why I gave up on Second Life

Sony on the up, despite PS3 woes

July 29th, 2007 • Gaming, Technology

NEWS: Profits up for Sony, despite PS3 problems

See? Put a bit of effort into making your TVs the best on the market, and you don’t have to worry so much about the odd glitch - like your superstar games console being overpriced.

I’ve worked with the good folk at What Hi-Fi? Sound and Vision for some years, and trust their analysis implicitly. The test team had been raving over the quality of the new Sony Bravia LCD range, and that praise has clearly made its way through to buyers: the screens have been selling like hot cakes. So much so that the PS3’s problems have been off-set by the popularity of the rest of the range.