Despite Wii’s excellent early start in the global market, many analysts have up to now opted to back PS3 for ultimate next-gen supremacy, but now US firm IDC says that it believes Wii will ultimately get the better of Xbox 360 and PS3.

“We expect Wii to capture a little more than a third of the worldwide market by 2008, rising slightly above Sony's PS3 and Microsoft's Xbox 360,” IDC gaming program manager Billy Pidgeon stated. "With the Wii, Nintendo is abdicating the specification war, leaving Sony and Microsoft to slug it out between themselves for the hardcore market.

“We believe concerted efforts to broaden the appeal of videogames beyond the traditional enthusiast/hardcore base will deepen the industry's penetration. This is good news for an industry that seemed to be receding last year due to over-saturation of the core base."

One thing on which IDC concurs with the numerous other analysts in the market, however, is that we won’t see a single format dominate the next-gen in the same way that PS2 has dominated the current generation of machines.