 The Wii’s Virtual Console has sold 7.8 million downloads so far, totaling 3.5 billion yen, which is about $33 million, according to a post by IGN quoting Nintendo executive Shinji Hatano. With 175 games available, according to that most trusted of sources Wikipedia, that comes out to about $188,500 per game and about 44,500 downloads per game.
Apparently, Nintendo doesn’t know whether that’s good or not.
“We’re currently unsure if this is a lot or low,” Hatano said. “They’re not bad figures.”
The costs for maintaining the Virtual Console service can’t be very high, so I would guess that they’re at least making a tidy amount. Then again, when you’ve sold over 1 million consoles and grossed $172 million in one week, $33 million in about a year can’t be terribly exciting.
![[Slashdot]](http://slashdot.org/favicon.ico)
![[Digg]](http://digg.com/favicon.ico)
![[Reddit]](http://reddit.com/favicon.ico)
![[del.icio.us]](http://images.del.icio.us/static/img/delicious.small.gif)
![[Facebook]](http://www.facebook.com/favicon.ico)
![[Technorati]](http://technorati.com/favicon.ico)
![[Google]](http://www.google.com/favicon.ico)
![[StumbleUpon]](http://www.stumbleupon.com/favicon.ico)
 Nintendo had it’s biggest week ever, selling 653,000 DS Lites, the all-time high for any console from the company, and 350,000 Wiis, second only to the week of launch.
My response is what did you expect? Of course it’s going to be more than they have ever sold for previous consoles. Video games, especially consoles, have only exploded into a multi-billion dollar industry since then, so it’s not like there’s a smaller pool of people to buy the things.
It’s like when movie companies break opening weekend records. Movies break these records because it costs twice as much to go to the movies as it did even 10 years ago, let alone the 50 years since some of the greatest movies have been released. In a similar, though admittedly slightly different way, video games are going to continuously break these records because they’re only going to get more popular. Of course, when they reach a certain point of saturation the record-breakings will come slower, but they will still happen for the same reason.
What’s more interesting are the relative records. What precentage of the population that plays video games bought a DS in this one week? If it’s more than the percentage of gamers that bought a NES when it was 3 years from it’s U.S. launch, then that’s something impressive and would certainly make me say it had broken some records.
Nintendo of America has set a new sales record by selling more products during the Thanksgiving week than at any other time in the company’s history.
During the period November 18 to November 24, over 653,000 DS units were sold, smashing the previous record of 600,000 Game Boy Advance consoles sold in 2005.
A further 350,000 Wii home systems were also snapped up by Christmas shoppers, along with “millions of games and accessories”. Here is the full release:
In the first week of the 2007 holiday shopping season, Nintendo of America has sold more Nintendo products than at any other time in its history. This includes more than 653,000 Nintendo DSâ„¢ portable video game systems, 350,000 Wiiâ„¢ home systems and millions of games and accessories throughout the United States – and the season is just getting started.
Nintendo DS set a new all-time sales record for Thanksgiving week, eclipsing the previous mark of 600,000 Game Boy® Advance systems sold during the same period in the United States in 2005. Nintendo DS remains on track to be the top-selling video game system of 2007.
Nintendo’s 350,000 Wii systems represent the highest one-week U.S. sales total outside of its launch week one year ago. Wii has been dubbed the must-have gift of the 2007 holiday season and has been placed at the top of numerous gift lists. Nintendo has repeatedly increased its shipments and its fiscal-year sales forecast for Wii in an attempt to meet soaring demand. Wii reached 5 million sold in the United States faster than any video game system in history, after only 12 months of availability there.
Both Wii and Nintendo DS have continued their yearlong momentum into the holidays without altering their prices. And both remain attractive values for shoppers: Wii has an MSRP of $249.99, while Nintendo DS has an MSRP of $129.99.
“As shoppers look for ways to maximize their limited holiday spending money, they turn to gifts that can be used by the entire family,” says George Harrison, Nintendo of America’s senior vice president of marketing and corporate communications. “Wii and Nintendo DS offer something for every member of the family. They’re the most fun video game experiences at the most affordable price.”
With higher gas prices and fuel costs, and the lukewarm expectations for the 2007 holiday shopping season, Wii and Nintendo DS might be just what Santa ordered: Thirty-five percent of consumers said they plan to spend less than they did last year, according to a survey conducted by Opinion Research Corp. for the Consumer Federation of America and the Credit Union National Association. Similarly, a USA Today/Gallup Poll showed that 25 percent of Americans expect to spend less on gifts this year than they did in 2006.
Note that the internal Nintendo of America numbers referenced in this release represent sales from Sunday, Nov. 18, through Saturday, Nov. 24.
Remember that Wii features parental controls that let adults manage the content their children can access. For more information about this and other Wii features, visit Wii.com.
Filed under wii on November 21st, 2007 Yesterday Nintendo revealed that Super Mario Galaxy for the Wii sold over 500,000 units in its first week of sale in the US.
REDMOND, Wash., Nov. 20, 2007 – Could Super Mario Galaxyâ„¢ be the best video game of all time?
If you ask critics and consumers, the answer is a resounding yes. Reviewers for video game and mainstream media alike are responding with high marks to the boundless sense of wonder and fun the game brings to both experienced and novice players.
Independent review-tracking site GameRankings.com now lists Super Mario Galaxy for Nintendo’s Wiiâ„¢ system as the best-reviewed game of all time, and another review-tracking site, Metacritic.com, lists Super Mario Galaxy as having “Universal Acclaim,” with a score of 98 out of 100.
More on what reviewers are saying:
- GameSpot.com: Super Mario Galaxy “has tons of appeal for both the less experienced player and the longtime gamer. … If ever there were a must-own Wii game, Super Mario Galaxy is it.”
- Yahoo!: “… you’d be hard pressed to find (a game) as genuinely enjoyable as Mario’s latest. If you own a Wii, you should own this, too.”
- 1UP.com – “Galaxy proves that Mario matters just as much today as he did 25 years ago, and that makes him one of a kind in this medium. But don’t play Galaxy simply because Mario is the timeless godfather of gaming. No, play Galaxy because it’s fantastic.”
“Super Mario Galaxy had the strongest one-week debut of any Wii game to date and has also become the best-selling Mario title ever in its first week, with U.S. sales of more than 500,000, based on internal sales figures,” says George Harrison, Nintendo of America’s senior vice president of marketing and corporate communications. “It makes an easy gift choice as the holiday shopping season kicks off.”
Consumers can try Super Mario Galaxy before they buy it at one of 25 malls across the country during Nintendo’s Mall Experience, showcasing all the best video games for the holidays. Nintendo’s Mall Experience runs through Jan. 8. To find a mall near you, visit http://wii.nintendo.com/malltour_07.jsp.
For more information about Super Mario Galaxy, please visit www.SuperMarioGalaxy.com. Remember that Wii features parental controls that let adults manage the content their children can access. For more information about this and other Wii features, visit Wii.com.
 Video Game Chartz has released the hardware sales chart for America for the week ending Nov. 10, and once again Nintendo’s Wii is first and Sony has come in last.
The Wii came in first for the week at 192, 482, followed by the Xbox 360 at 173,895 and the DS at 142,299. Sony’s PSP came in a distant fourth at 75, 954 and the Playstation 3 came in an even more distant fifth at 63, 788.
All three next-gen consoles saw a jump in sales, though: 31 percent for the Wii, 25 percent for the Xbox 360 and 15 percent for the PS3.
I once predicted the Wii was the future of video game consoles. I said, since the Wii changes how we play games instead of just how we view them, it would be able to over take the Xbox 360 and PS3, which certainly go farther in terms of hardware power but don’t fundamentally do anything different than the original Playstation.
I think a lot of the industry on the console production side is focused on better hardware power for consoles because that’s what has worked before. If you look at the jumps from system to system, what what you notice most in the slide show is the change in detail, from 8-bit to 16-bit to 32-bit and the era of the Playstation, which by my estimation only ended with this generation. The real fundamental change, though, is the change in gameplay.
Indeed, much of Nintendo’s success comes from seeing where the next change in how we play games is going to come from. Likewise, their failure comes from not seeing these jumps. Sony won the last generation because all the other companies that got involved, Nintendo, Microsoft and to some extent Sega, were content to try to do more of the same, and the Playstation 2 just did it better, either because it was more powerful or more deeply embedded. If Nintendo, or anyone else for that matter, had figured out a new way to play games we probably wouldn’t have seen the Playstations dominate as heavily as they did, if they would have dominated at all.
Mario’s adventures across the consoles is a perfect example. Super Mario Bros. defined platforming in the 8-bit era. The next great change you notice is Super Mario 64 and the jump to 3D, which defined the 3D platforming genre. Where Mario failed most is Super Mario Sunshine, which didn’t do anything fundamentally different from Super Mario 64. It may be too soon to call Super Mario Galaxy yet another redefinition of platforming from a historical perspective, but that hasn’t stopped reviewers from doing so.
What really amazes me, however, is the public’s almost unquestioning acceptance of the Wii’s new terms of playing games. Usually people are very slow to accept change. Even though most of the games on the Wii are epic fail at fully utilizing the consoles innovations, the exceptions being first-party games, the console continues to sell out the day stores receive new shipments. Perhaps the public was already thirsty for something new after a prettier version of more of the same from last generation, even if the new doesn’t exactly work perfectly?
The real test for the Wii now is whether Nintendo will continue to string us along from one exceptional first-party game to the next, a third-party company will step in and finally get the motion controls as perfect as Nintendo does so the system can really show what it can do or the Wii slowly fades away into obscurity, something that could’ve been a revolutionary turning point in how we play games but turned into little more than a novelty for most people.
If nothing else, the Wii has shown there is serious money to be made in doing something differently. Hopefully console makers, and developers even more so, will take note.
|
|
