Nintendo's Wii gains in console wars

As it raced past rivals to become the hottest new video-game console, some analysts predicted Nintendo's Wii was little more than a fad.

Try telling that to Geoff Allen, who hasn't grown sick of playing the Wii after almost five months. He, his wife and his father are hooked on "Wii Sports."

"Within minutes, I can have fun," said Allen, a 36-year-old technology entrepreneur from Potomac Falls, Va. "I don't have to spend hours crawling through dungeons and learning all the complex button combos to become proficient. I love the Wii. It makes me happy."

U.S. consumers have snapped up 2.5 million Wii consoles since they hit the market in November. It's a sharp turnaround since the last round of the console wars, when Nintendo's GameCube was wiped out by Sony's PlayStation 2 and Microsoft's Xbox.

But Nintendo isn't taking its initial success for granted. Last week, it unveiled a series of games, such as "Mario Strikers Charged" and "Big Brain Academy," aimed at keeping a wide range of players interested.

Some analysts think the novelty might wear off and, when it does, consumers will stop buying new games for the Wii.

The difference between the Wii's graphics and those of its rivals, the PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360, also might become more noticeable as developers create games that take advantage of the more powerful consoles' processing power.

"Its appeal is primarily to casual gamers, and there's a serious question about how long casual gamers will stay engaged with the platform," said Van Baker, a consumer-technologies analyst with Gartner. "It wouldn't be surprising to see them lose interest after a relatively short amount of time."

So far, demand is outstripping supply. Stores are selling out of the Wii within hours of receiving them.

Sales are so hot, the Japanese company is widely expected to increase its annual sales forecast of 14 million units for its current fiscal year.

It helps that the Wii is $249, compared to the PS3 at $599 and the Xbox 360, priced from $299 to $479, depending on the features.

Last month, U.S. consumers bought 360,000 Wii systems, versus 174,000 Xbox 360s and 82,000 PlayStation 3s, according to NPD Group.

"We have become a viral and cultural phenomenon," Reginald Fils-Aime, president of Redmond-based Nintendo of America, said last week.

To bring in more casual gamers, Nintendo developed a remote that uses a motion sensor to let players use their arm movements to control the action on the screen. That's what hooked Allen and his family.

When he showed the games to his 63-year-old father, Allen had to pull him away from the TV screen. "He was so into it, he forgot he was playing a video game," Allen said.

The controller, Allen explained, makes games such as the Wii version of tennis much more intuitive to play.

"If I want a cross court shot, I start low and rotate my forearm, and I get a nice cross-court spinning shot, just like real tennis," he said. "I don't have to learn anything new."

That ease, combined with realistic physics, has led the Wii to pop up in unexpected places.

The Glenrose Rehabilitation Hospital in Edmonton, Alberta, uses the Wii to help physical-therapy patients improve movement and balance. Norwegian Cruise Line, which caters to seniors, has purchased the system for all of its ships.

The Wii's popularity has made it an attractive system for game publishers, whose ability to crank out games is vital to keeping consumers interested.

It also generally costs less to create games for Wii than for the Sony and Microsoft systems, especially because it shares technology with its predecessor, the GameCube.

Wii games can cost anywhere from $1 million to $7 million and take less than a year to make, whereas a typical PS3 and Xbox 360 game can cost more than $20 million and take more than a year to produce because of the complexity and high-level graphics involved.

Developers also like the Wii because it frees them to focus less on making games look visually beautiful and more on just making them fun to play.

While the coming holiday season is shaping up to be a blockbuster one for Nintendo, some analysts question whether the Wii has enough steam to last longer. The sophisticated hardware for PS3 and Xbox 360 is expected to keep those consoles relevant for another decade.

"The Wii in a couple of years is going to look like old technology with low resolution, slow performance," Baker said. "People may not be accepting of that."

But 31 percent of Wii owners surveyed in March by Frank N. Magid Associates, a media consulting company, said they expected to play the Wii more often a year from now, compared with 21 percent of Xbox 360 owners.

"We don't see it fading," said Mike Vorhaus, a managing director with the Los Angeles company.