The Nintendo Wii was the highest selling console in American this March. Nothing unusual about that, except that to win that title, it outsold the Xbox 360 by 459,000 systems. That’s a lot.
Overall Nintendo sold 721,000 Wiis, which made it the biggest non-Christmas month for the Wii yet. The DS was shamed into second place with a paltry 698,000 units.
The PSP is rising in popularity, lately. It was the highest selling non-Nintendo console. With 297,000 units sold. It’s a solid number, but one that only really highlights the different league Nintendo are playing in. It’s amazing how far it’s come since the unveiling of the name Wii was met with thunderous laughter and pronouncements of the death of the company.
My Mum has a Wii. Granted she doesn’t really play on it a lot (although she is scarily good at Wii Sports Boxing), but she has one. She also has a DS, yet until these systems were released she had no real interest in consoles, and I could never imagine her buying a Xbox.
Contrary to what some people have said, the games are selling, too. In March Super Smash Bros. Brawl sold 2.7 million copies. Compare that to the second-biggest selling game of the month (Rainbow Six, which sold 752,000 copies) and you can see how massive that figure is.
This week the BBC iPlayer came to the Wii. Not the Xbox or the PS3, the all-in-one media centres, the Wii. Things like this speak volumes.
The dominance of the Wii has been obvious for a while, but it’s the scale of the dominance that shocking.
The question now, is not who will win any arbitrary and made-up console war. The question to ask is if the Wii will become a standard, like DVD or CD? Will the Wii become the single-format that has been talked about so much in the past?
Probably not. This generation.
American Hardware Sales for March
WII 721K
NDS 698K
PSP 297K
360 262K
PS3 257K
PS2 216K