According to Melbourne's Herald-Sun, not everything is rosy for the Southern Hemisphere branch of Nintendo.
Not all is well in Australia as far as Nintendo is concerned. In an article in today's Herald-Sun, Nintendo is clearly trailing behind in the next-generation console race. According to the article, the GameCube has only a six percent market share, with the PlayStation 2 taking the bulk of the sales. According to the article:
That equates to a PS2 in more than 424,000 living rooms across the country, 209,000 Xboxes and 67,000 GameCubes.
NAL's David Yarnton notes that Nintendo is not performing nearly as well as they'd hoped. Nintendo was aiming for a 15-20% share in the market. But due to the GameCube's shaky start -- the Xbox was released two months earlier and Nintendo was forced to reduce their console price even before the system was on the shelves in May last year -- coupled with trailing third all the way and the lack of DVD and CD playability, it was difficult to convince the average user to purchase a GameCube. EB salespeople have often recommended the PS2 or Xbox when customers were having trouble choosing between the three because "they can play DVDs".
However, Mr. Yarnton believes that games such as Metroid Prime and The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker (both of which were only released recently in Australia) are capable of shifting consoles on their own. However, if American sales are anything to go by, this may not be the case. Publishers have been pulling a few of their multi-console releases for GameCube, because it simply doesn't make a profit for them.
Nintendo, however, still has the Game Boy Advance to rely on and is hoping to push the GameCube to Game Boy Advance connectivity features to increase sales of both systems.