Wii did it: sellout in Japan

Alex Zaharov-Reutt
Sunday, 03 December 2006 19:25

Your IT - Entertainment

Nintendo have launched the Wii to sellout success in Japan. Wii didn’t expect anything less, and neither did we.

Well, my colleague Stan Beer originally thought otherwise, questioning the Wii’s ability to truly appeal to a new gaming audience: those that simply were not interesting in console games before.

Now in his latest article, he concedes that perhaps the Wii will be successful after all, with over 1 million sales in just a few days – 600,000 in the US and 400,000 on day one in Japan. Nothing to sneeze at, he says. Nothing to Wheeze at either, despite the heart pumping movement and action to Wii so easily encourages in its users.

Nintendo are on the verge of launching in Europe and Australia, where we can expect not only sellout crowds, but sellout sales to match Japanese and American enthusiasm.

If you haven’t yet seen a Wii on display in major department and retail stores, do yourself a favor and check one out. The damn things are irresistible – or is that wiiresistible? Perhaps wiisistance is futile after all!

Nintendo expect to sell 4 million Wii’s worldwide by the end of 2006, so there are 3 million more on the way to all worldwide territories.

It’s the closest thing to a successful worldwide near simultaneous global launch any games console manufacturer has ever achieved, and it’s good to see that it’s Nintendo that have managed to do it – a company with presumably far fewer resources than Sony or Microsoft, despite Nintendo’s long standing success in the games console business.

What Nintendo needs to do now is to keep the good games coming. People need a reason to Wii as often as possible.

Fat kids beware: your parents are going to buy you a Wii. How far off can the Wii fitness program be? They already exist for the PS2 and original Xbox, looking much like a TV show with an animated instructor on screen guiding you through the exercise moves that will have you fit and trim in no time.

But those computerized fitness programs needed you to actually get up off the couch and load up the DVD with the fitness program in it, and then actually run through the exercise routines. The Wii requires no such thing. Just playing it is a workout.

Who’d have thought a Japanese games console could be the potential answer to the world’s obesity problems? We didn’t think so, but it looks like Wii did!