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

At Nintendo’s financial briefing held in Japan, company president Satoru Iwata made a comment about what to expect at this year’s Electronic Entertainment Expo (E3).

What we are looking at are the cumulative Wii and DS sales through the end of 2008. Wii has been selling at industry’s record pace so far, and with new customers acquired by the gaming population expansion efforts, it is not impossible for Wii’s total sales to exceed the final install base of PS2. Wii still has much more room for expansion. We can expect more sales of software in the next fiscal year than in the current year. With what kind of software is Nintendo going to achieve this goal? Well, it will be shown at E3 to be held in the U.S. this June.

It seems Nintendo has big plans for the Wii at this year’s E3. I wonder what kind of games can we expect to see? Mario, Zelda, or perhaps Kid Icarus? Then again, Iwata could simply be referring to games we’ve already seen, such as Wii Sports Report.

Tags: E3, E3 2009, Electronic Entertainment Expo, PlayStation 2, PS2, Satoru Iwata, Wii

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