Japan Wii’s a lot: 5-to-1 sales over the PS3!

Alex Zaharov-Reutt
Tuesday, 05 June 2007 00:42

Your IT - Entertainment

Tokyo gaming research firm Enterbrain says that the Nintendo Wii is outselling the Sony PS3 by a factor of five to one in May, accelerating from four to one in April, in the latest bad PS3 news.

Sony can’t even get a lucky break in Japan, where the Wii is seriously outselling the PS3, as reported by Bloomberg. Bloomberg quotes the Tokyo gaming research company Enterbrain Inc with the information, and say that while Nintendo sold 251,794 Wii consoles, Sony only sold around 50,000 units.

This compares with 11,082 Xbox 360’s from Microsoft, showing they are doing even worse in Japan, although naturally they are still selling units at more than 2000 per week, while the Nintendo DS is doing to the PSP what the Wii is doing to the PS3: also outselling it five to one.

Enterbrain’s figures are 620,670 DS handheld consoles compared with only 123,673 PSP’s.

This is all despite the Wii having the worst graphics, standard definition instead of high definition, no hard disk, the inability to play DVD movies, no Blu-ray or HD DVD – but simply a unique control mechanism that has caught the imagination of people around the planet.

At figures of around 50,000 units sold for the PS3 in May, Sony are still selling over 10,000 PS3’s per week, which is nothing to be sneezed at, and as programmers release better quality PS3 games and that take better advantage of the PS3’s own motion sensing capabilities, we should start seeing an upsurge in PS3 sales.

But for now the Wii rules the roost, with a long hard slog ahead for Sony and Microsoft to take back the initiative, especially come the big holiday/Christmas season later this year, in what will be the biggest console gaming battle to be fought ever.