Latest Wii, Nintendo DS, Game Boy, and GameCube news, screenshots, and game previews

Kaz Hirai, current Chairman and group CEO of Sony, has been taking a lot of heat lately for his recent comments dismissing Nintendo and Microsoft as competitors and claiming PlayStation is the “official” industry leader.

“This is not meant in terms of numbers, or who’s got the biggest install base, or who’s selling most in any particular week or month, but I’d like to think that we continue official leadership in this industry,” Hirai told Official PlayStation Magazine.

“It’s difficult to talk about Nintendo, because we don’t look at their console as being a competitor. They’re a different world, and we operate in our world - that’s the kind of way I look at things.

“And with the Xbox - again, I can’t come up with one word to fit. You need a word that describes something that lacks longevity,” he added with a laugh.

Today Microsoft’s Aaron Greenberg responded to Hirai’s comments claiming that Sony is an “old hardware company that’s comfortable with its market position” and they’re “out of touch with where the industry and consumer is today”.

Tags: Kaz Hirai, Microsoft, PlayStation 3, Sony, Xbox 360

VentureBeat has a great article which compares the sales of the Wii and PlayStation 3 to the PlayStation 2 and Nintendo GameCube, respectively.

• “In just over two years, the Wii outsold the PS2’s comparable initial sales by 10 percent, according to the NPD. That is, in the first 26 months of the Wii, Nintendo sold 17.5 million Wiis while Sony sold 15.9 million PS2s in the U.S. in the first 26 months of sales.
• By comparison, the PlayStation 3 sold 6.79 million units in the U.S. during the same initial 26-month period, compared to 6.75 million GameCubes, which finished a distant third last generation and forced Nintendo to rethink how it sold video games.
• Microsoft, for its part, sold 9.2 million Xbox 360s in the U.S. in its first 26 months, trailing Nintendo in a faraway second by a margin of 2 to 1 — the same position the company held last generation.”

That is, in the first 26 months of the Wii, Nintendo sold 17.5 million Wiis while Sony sold 15.9 million PS2s in the U.S. in the first 26 months of sales. If the sales pattern holds, we expect Nintendo to sell 55 million Wiis in America by 2014 and 154 million units worldwide.

Tags: GameCube, Microsoft, PlayStation 2, PlayStation 3, PS2, PS3, Sales, Sony, Wii, Xbox 360