Nintendo of America is believed to be planning a huge and historic campaign to support Wii Fit.
Wedbush Morgan's Michael Pachter has said that although US video game retailer GameStop is reporting record sales of US$7.1 billion, the company is set to lose ground to retailers like Wal-Mart and Target in the future.
What's more relevant, however, is that Pachter also discussed that Wedbush expects a "repeat of the 2002 phenomenon in 2008," meaning that hardware sales are anticipated to be flat to slightly negative for the industry.
"We expect overall Wii and PS3 dollar sales to grow by approximately $400 million per console in the U.S., but expect the other consoles to decline by around the same amount," Pachter added. "At the same time, we expect the Wii supply situation to increase by 150,000 per month, on average, with allocations of hardware favoring the mass merchants once supply and demand are in balance."
And the first glimpse of that, according to Pachter, will occur on May 19 when Nintendo debuts Wii Fit. Further on the subject of the game, Pachter expressed that he's learnt that Nintendo of America plans to support the game "with the biggest marketing campaign in its history."
Pachter added that Wedbush believes "it is unlikely that such a large marketing campaign is intended to disproportionately benefit GameStop. Rather, we think that the Nintendo campaign is likely to feature key retail partners such as Target and Best Buy, notorious for attracting so-called ‘couch potatoes’.”