In case it wasn’t already obvious, more figures have been released that show that the Nintendo Wii is selling quite well.

Having owned a Nintendo Wii for some time now and since I read Gamespot’s excellent review of No More Heroes I think we can honestly say that Nintendo are making a massive comeback in the home gaming console market. Sony and Microsoft should be worried; Nintendo has made a clear battle cry.

According to an article in Famitsu magazine that quotes data from Enterbrain, the Wii has now sold over five million units in Japan alone.

5 million units is quite an impressive number but ultimately the success of the Wii will obviously be down to how many third party game providers actually produce some quality titles for this unit.

The report also lists the five top-selling Nintendo Wii games in Japan. At number one is Wii Sports, which has so far sold 2,663,938 units; followed by Wii Play with 2,139,084; Mario Party 8 with 1,153,648; Wii Fit with 1,113,626; and last but not least Super Mario Galaxy with 843,961. In Japan, Wii Play comes bundled with an extra controller, as it does in the UK and America, but Wii Sports doesn’t come with the console and has to be purchased separately.

That’s a whole lot of games and those numbers should be enough to convince third party providers that coding games for the Nintendo Wii is a worthwhile pursuit. Many people have been claiming that the Nintendo Wii will sink to obscurity relatively quickly because of the lack of quality games. These people have been proven wrong and these are the same people who slated the Nintendo DS. Wrong on both counts folks; the Nintendo Wii goes from strength to strength it seems. The situation where we have a lack of games for this quality system is possibly because many people didn’t anticipate such a runaway success for this console.

Nintendo’s third-quarter financial results are due to be released tomorrow, and one analyst has stated that he thinks the company is likely to beat its “conservative” estimates of a $14.5 billion guidance, and that it will be announced that some seven million Wiis will have been sold globally.

These fantastic figures make the people who are still bashing the Nintendo Wii sound pretty stupid. It is now the worldwide leader in home console sales and this is a fact which you simply cannot argue with. Nintendo have proven that they can take the home gaming scene to a much wider audience and they have proven this in spectacular fashion. We are definitely rushing out and buying a copy of no more heroes as soon as we can and in the meantime there are a few of us still playing the Dance Dance Revolution Wii!

Source: gamespot

Only three times as many? We thought it would’ve been more than that. Sales figures are notoriously untrustworthy unless the source is reliable. Just the other day we were reading reports that Sony was top dog or at least close to being No. 1 and now we see that they have been overtaken by Nintendo, allegedly. What choppy seas Wii sail in!

Nintendo sold 3.63 million Wii units last year, compared with PlayStation 3’s 1.21 million, Tokyo-based Enterbrain said today in a faxed statement. Microsoft Corp.’s Xbox 360 game machines sold 257,841 units, the researcher’s estimates showed.

This news story actually shouldn’t be surprising. With some of the revolutionary games coming out for the Wii, the console is appealing to a wide cross-section of the public which is creating the conditions for this fantastic little games box to break all records. Hey we loved the PS3 as much as anybody else but the Nintendo Wii represents a sea change and we hope will set the standards for games consoles in the future. Hell, even my grandma loves it!

In October, Sony cut prices in Japan by as much as 10 percent. In November, the Tokyo-based company introduced its cheapest model at 39,980 yen ($367) to compete with the Wii, which is priced at 25,000 yen. The PlayStation outsold the Wii for the first time in Japan in the period from Oct. 29 to Nov. 25, according to Enterbrain.

It’s easy to get complacent. Games developers need to ramp it up a notch and start developing more games for the Wii. The games we currently have like the Dance Dance Revolution Wii are excellent but we need more. If Nintendo is to continue with this amazing growth the game developers will need to keep up with demand and keep producing the highly addictive games which seem easy to develop on this console. The Wii has been so successful because it is not necessarily limited to traditional gamers but it appeals to many many more people who use it in a more casual fashion for general entertainment with party games and the Wii Sports. Rock on Nintendo!

Source: Bloomberg