Nintendo Sells Two Million Wiis in November

[A Black Falcon]

... More than double the combined total of the PS2, PSP, and PS3 all combined for the month. Over double the X360's total. The Wii outsold the PS2, PSP, PS3, and X360 all combined; the DS didn't do that, but it did sell nearly twice what the X360 did, or a lot more than PSP, PS2, or PS3. :)

The X360 did sell double what the PS3 did, though, so MS has something to be happy about too... and an X360 game was first on the sales charts. But Sony... yeah, Sony's in trouble. :)

http://www.neogaf.com/forum/showthread.php?t=345152

But two million in November... it's a new record. That's never happened before. Sony's 2.7 million PS2s in December 2002 is evidently the record, but they had 1.3 million that November... the only question about December is, how many Wiis will Nintendo have? They'll obviously sell whatever that number is.

As for games, Nintendo obviously isn't doing well there, for hardcore gamers. Their focus has been so strongly on the casual... still, if I had a Wii this year, I'd definitely be wanting the Wii Wario Land game for sure, at least... but yeah, between Wii Music and Wii Fit, it's obvious what their focus is at the moment. But still, they do have SOME games for the base in development... but I definitely never would have guessed that success would actually lead Nintendo to arguably release fewer (first/second-party) games I care about on this platform than their last two "unsuccessful" ones. But if all of the stuff we're hearing coming up comes that might be different... Sin & Punishment 2, Pikmin 3, "new Mario and Zelda", etc.

[DMiller]

Did I totally miss when Wario Land was released? I was also bemoaning the lack of good games this season for the Wii. I'm not really interested in Wii Music or Wii Fit, and I'll probably hold off on Animal Crossing until I can get it cheaper. I'm just disappointed that 3rd parties have been focusing on minigame collections. I guess it's because of the Wii's generally casual base, but I'm still waiting for a great FPS using the Wiimote. Metroid Prime was great, but it's not really a FPS.

[A Black Falcon]

Yeah, it came out a couple months ago... September to be exact, looking it up. Supposedly it's pretty good, but not that hard... oh well, as I love the Wario Land games, I'm sure I'd like it (and it's supposed to be far better than the not-very-good Wario: Master of Disguise on the DS...). Great graphics too, very nice 2d art...

But yeah, this is arguably Nintendo's first holiday season since before they released the NES that they did not have a major, hardcore title out for the holidays... the only way to get around this is if you count Wii Animal Crossing as "hardcore", which I, at least, probably wouldn't. And this comes as Nintendo breaks sales records? Amazing... they figured out how to hit the mass market like never before. It's looking like a Playstation-like industry re-alignment, really... but even though Nintendo seems to mostly have forgotten their base (NOA hasn't announced its Q1 2009 schedule yet, they're bringing over fewer titles than ever from Japan, etc) in favor of counting their piles of money, hopefully it won't last forever... and they did release stuff like Fire Emblem RD, Mario Galaxy, Metroid Prime 3, etc.

But really, that is the question... why care what your hardcore fans think when aiming casual is such a brilliantly successful strategy? When will they start to pay attention to their longtime fans again and stop saying that Animal Crossing and Wii Music should, somehow, make us happy?

[A Black Falcon]

Oh yeah, and Sony's sales are down year-on-year, for all three of their platforms. That is, comparing November 2007 sales to November 2008, all three systems are selling less this year than last year. Sony's excuse? "Year-on-year our sales are up overall, for the year as a whole"... true so far, but pretty deceptive given how bad their performance this month was. :)

(But hey, when your cheapest system is $400, your competitors' are $200 and $250, and you're in third place and don't drop the price when Microsoft does, what do you expect?)