Okay, what is it with people thinking a hack would significantly increase hardware sales? You do realize the people who would buy a system specifically for a hack are actually a rather small minority?
Hacks won't help for shit on sales, especially when it comes down to the brunt of their money coming from software. And if you're buying it so it can be hacked, odds are you're either not buying or pirating games.
Sales increases come from doing things that normal consumers want, not from what a minor minority want.
And the wii sold well because it was the best system.
The biggest factors influencing sales are:
Popularity
Userbase
Advertisements
How good games actually are is not as big of a factor as you think.
When parents go out shopping for a video game console, when people want video game consoles, when someone has to decide between a video game console, the average person will choose the most popular one (or one that a friend will have). Holy fuck, how many people picked the wii because it was hackable; not a single one of them was part of the minority that knew about hacking. They have all had friends with hacked wii's so they bought: harddrives, wii's, wii accessories and sometimes even wii games. I have had about 80% of my close friends go out and buy wii's who had no intentions of spending money on games.
At my school, we had this big ass event, in one of the concession stands, there was a wii with a homebrew channel on it. In the first 30 minutes of hanging around there, there was a fuckaton amount of people asking about it and what it can do. FUCKATON FUCKATON FUCKATON. Most of my friends, never played consoles, never knew shit about what games were on the wii, never anything. Yet, holy fuckaton they bought into it.
Same thing with the playstation, when people came over and saw a TI-84 calculator hooked up to my playstation, they were like WTF. Then every mother fucking friend went out and bought a playstation; holy mothafuckaton.
These people aren't gamers
These people had no taste on what games they like
Yet they went out and bought these shit mothers.
Think about Christmas time, the majority of children who have had no idea of what game console to get, they are going to choose the ones all of their friends are talking about. What is "good" has so many definitions, it's impossible to say all the good games are to one console, my cousin swears that PS3 has all the good games but I hated the majority and loved the majority of the wii games. From here you can see the high dependence on that minority you are talking about and the majority.I'll say it say it again and bold it, while the minority only knows how to hack, there is a strong relationship that influences the majority to buy into it.
Now what happens when a console gets hacked? Surely, it spreads like wildfire through out a small community, from there, it leaks like wildfire making the minority into a bigger minority. Then the amount of popularity, userbase, increases drastically, the console advertises for themselves. Then the majority take over. You should see all the sales of the PS3, when the console got hacked, holy mother fuckaton sales increased. Then as it couldn't get hacked, it slowly declined. However, the selling point now was still a fuck more than before it was hacked.
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You are right, the wii being hacked is not the cause of the system to start selling well. It's the popularity that's gained from being able to be hacked which boosts the sales.