Nintendo expects Wii to take 45% market share

George Harrison, Nintendo's senior vice president of marketing and corporate communications, expects Wii dominance to continue.

Speaking in an interview with Wired News, Harrison has revealed that Nintendo expects the Wii to go on to take a 40-45% market share in this generation - 50% not out of the question.

"We also have a belief that we can be, of this lifecycle, 40-45% of the hardware that's being sold. And that would be a phenomenal increase for us over the GameCube era. But on the other hand, we could get over 50%," said Harrison. "And a lot of that depends on what our competitors do. If they only focus on the Grand Theft Autos and the Halos and things of that nature, they're focusing on a very tiny part of the market. The overall market is growing so dramatically that they're going to miss out on the opportunities that we're seeing in the expanded audience."

Harrison is also of the belief that this generation could last longer than the typical five-to-six year lifecycle for a video game console.

"In the past, we've always had five- to six-year lifecycles which were sort of forced by someone jumping ahead and using a new piece of technology. And we're finding out now that the appeal of faster processors and better graphics is really sort of reaching a diminishing point," said Harrison. "There's a price point and there's the quality that's holding the PlayStation 3 back. They're selling so many PlayStation 2s because people are saying, "You know what? The graphics are pretty good, the price is good, and the library is good." So we have a great expectation that this lifecycle's actually going to last more than five years."

Harrison also addressed the continuing issue of Wii availability, noting that the process to up production has begun, but it takes time for ramped-up production to filter down to increased stock.

"... it takes about four months from the time we want to increase it to line up the parts and the production capacity and things of that nature. So it's already begun to increase slowly," Harrison told Wired News.

Even with increased production meaning more Wiis at retail, Nintendo doesn't currently know what to expect in the traditional busy holiday period.

"... we're going to make our best guess as to what we believe we should produce and try to ramp up as much as we can for the fall. But it doesn't mean we won't -- even if we're back in stock in August/September, it doesn't mean there won't be shortages for the holidays," said Harrison. "It's a good situation to be in, although we don't want to discourage consumers too much."