Will the Netflix deal help spur PS3 sales for Sony? Can it help Nintendo's fading Wii?

Nintendo’s Wii continues to feel the hard edge of a slow consumer economy, seeing its sales continue to lag despite a 20 percent price cut to $200 per unit. It’s the eighth consecutive month that the gaming console has reported declining sales. Bloomberg says Nintendo Wii sales plummeted 37 percent last month.

Perhaps a nod to the changing uses of gaming consoles as users look to them to become media players and portals to streaming media services like Netflix, which last month announced it would partner with Sony’s PS3 to provide users access to its Watch Instantly streaming media service, is partly to blame. In fact, only the PlayStation 3 saw growth for the month, reporting sales were up 70 percent. Microsoft’s Xbox 360 also saw a drop in its sales similar to the Wii, off 33 percent from a month ago.

The Wii is being mentioned as the next system in line to pick up Netflix, but those rumblings remain just rumors to this point. While the Wii has a 48 percent market share in the U.S., it currently doesn’t carry the same panache as a home entertainment hub as do the Xbox 360 and the PS3. “Investors are getting used to looking at weak numbers for the Wii,” Yusuke Tsunoda, a Tokai Tokyo Securities Co. analyst told Bloomberg. “The Wii's period of expansion is over and investor’s attention has turned to Nintendo’s new hardware strategy.”

Just an aside, here, but the Xbox and PS3 should get bumps in sales this month, call it a surge if you will, as Activision’s Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 is flying off the shelves like rounds from a Gatling gun. Activision said it sold 4.7 million copies of the new game in North America and the United Kingdom alone, pulling in some $310 million on the first day it was available.The one big name system it doesn’t run on? Nintendo’s Wii.

For more:
- see this Bloomberg article

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