Last week, USA Today posted an article talking about how the Nintendo Wii is still selling a record number of units – even two years after its initial launch. Here’s a little fun fact from the story:
Nintendo’s sales mark represents the most game systems sold in any month since November 2002, when Sony sold 2.7 million PlayStation 2 systems (priced at $200), Frazier says. The PS2 has gone on to sell about 43.2 million in the U.S.
A quick jump over to VGChartz.com shows us that Wii has sold 18.28 million units in the United States, which is a little less than 4 million more than its nearest competitor, Microsoft’s XBox 360. This number is also about 12 million more than the PlayStation 3, which would have almost certainly been cut as a product if Sony lost the Blu-Ray vs. HD-DVD war with Microsoft.
Anyway, the point here is that it is remarkable that the video game industry has only been marginally rocked by the market tumult. And it is even more impressive that Nintendo has managed to build a juggernaut system without the use of an internal hard drive or high definition graphics. Add in that the bulk of the games available for the Wii are family-friendly and generally leave the hardcore gamers out in the cold, and you have a real phenomenon in the video game industry.
As a guy who is financially invested in the successful outcome of at least one video game software company (which has not been mentioned in this post), I hope that the good news keeps coming in!
