Japanese sales tracker Media Create has announced 100 million units of DS software have been sold in Japan since launch. 100 million in almost three and a half years! That’s quite a feat when you compare software sales to Japan’s PS2 power house which took four years and three months to hit the 100 million software mark. Twenty one of the 922 DS games released have sold more than 1 million units.

Nintendo’s Top Ten DS games in Japan

New Super Mario Bros - 5,174,163 units
Brain Age 2 - 4,835,159 units
Animal Crossing DS - 4,693,662 units
Brain Age - 3,771,440 units
Mario Kart DS - 3,042,753 units
Pokemon Diamond - 3,005,505 units
Pokemon Pearl - 2,490,564 units
English Training DS - 2,216,322 units
Mario Party DS - 1,706,506 units
Big Brain Academy - 1,654,285 units

Will the juggernaut ever slow?

[IGN]

VG Chartz is reporting Carnival Games has surpassed one million copies sold worldwide.

Released in Aug. 2007, the exclusive Wii minigame collection has since exceeded virtually all sales expectations despite receiving mediocre review scores. Carnival Games is currently averaging an aggregate score of 56 on Metacritic.

Carnival Games was developed by Washington-based Cat Daddy Games, a studio primarily focused on PC games, and published by Global Star Software. G4TV reported a rumor on Jan. 17 that a sequel may be in development for a 2008 release.

Breaking news straight from Nikkei (An official Japanese business news source) confirmed through Nintendo that Wii Fit has hit the one million sales mark as of January 6th, 2008. Having only launched a little over a month ago, (Dec. 1st) this stands as quite an accomplishment. Who knew the Japanese were so into gaming fitness. This number is even more impressive when compared to Wii Sports (sold separate from Wii in Japan) which took a whole year to sell two million copies). These figures really show the evolving Japanese gaming market which has shifted farther away from “hard core” titles in favor of puzzlers, and fitness games.

This also gives hope to the upcoming Wii Fit launch for North America and Europe which should be a hit. Speaking of the NA launch, 1up.com has sneaked a bit of news into their Wii Fit article that only spells out an exciting summer.

“…Wii Fit is expected to be one of the year’s biggest sellers both in Japan and abroad. North Americans can expect to see the game on May 20th…”

Nintendo still has Wii Fit listed as TBA, but we’ll keep a close eye on this rumor. Meanwhile, lets sit back and behold another revolution in the way we game.

Are you one of the doubters? When you saw Wii Fit debut earlier this year, did you scoff and sneer like 95% of the “enthusiast press?”

News today from Japan goes a long way towards making people like you the left out in the cold variety, as Wii Fit has not only sold decently, it also boosted the sales of other Wii games that many people were ready to right off as disappointments in the land of the rising sun. Like Super Mario Galaxy, which had slipped out of the much ballyhooed top ten list picture until today. It was a shame, really, and this new trend, I hope, is indicative of a resurgence for the plucky plumber, whose latest effort is perhaps one of his best ever.

On a related note, Nintendo’s Reggie Fils-Aime was peppered earlier this month about the “attach rate” of the Wii and how it was perceived to be poor, especially when compared to the Xbox 360 (here’s some free analysis: it is lower, but it’s not as bad as the press was reporting in 2007. Surprise). I bring that up because I’d like to know if there’s ever been reporting done on the attach rate of an accessory for any given console.

Anyway, here’s the list, which is very reminiscent of Nintendo-themed top ten lists from earlier this year… (more…)

A report from the Financial Times is confirming Wii domination of world-wide sales. This news comes weeks after VGchartz first reported the Wii surpassing the Xbox360 globally. Financial Times seems to have more connections with world retailers which gives us a clearer, and more trusting statement. The Tokyo based site lists the actual units sold with the Wii at 9 million, Xbox360 at 8.9 million, and the PS3 at 3.7 million. A Tokyo annalist clearly states the reasons…

“The fact of the matter is that, despite the Xbox’s earlier launch in November 2005, it only sells in two markets – Europe and the US. Japan is home turf to Sony and Nintendo, so the Xbox is not a player at all. In contrast, Nintendo has been selling well in all three major markets.”

The question is when will Nintendo, Sony, and Microsoft give us a clear-cut statement of their global sales? Only time will tell.

It could have just been my Wii, through chance or some weird defect that barred it from receiving the full firmware update from last week, but tonight as I prepared for bed in my Nintendo fanman Mother Brain boss chamber bedroom the ol’ blue light flickered to life once again. That’s three times in the past week and a half, for those of you still up and keeping score.

Anyway, after I finished up my DVR’d episodes of Entourage and Flight of the Conchords, I fired up the Wii, flicked my ancient Phillips HDTV tube over to AV5 (the NES, DVD player and SNES/N64 combo have the other AV channels — as if you care!), and watched what my newly updated system had to offer.

It was an Internet update, seemingly supplied by Nintendo to supplant the previous update, which was freezing up Wii’s that had tuned into the Internet Channel. Note I said “freezing” and not “bricked,” which is a term the world has reserved solely for the Xbox 360 and its robust new 3-year warranty program.

The update took all of 5 seconds to complete. How do I know? Because as I fuddled around with my Dell AC adapter to plug in my company supplied Latitude D620 for extended Infendo posting power, I knocked over my wireless router AND the RCN cable modem to which it has been faithfully attached for the the past year, and it became unplugged. I had thought this was directly in the middle of the firmware update, and I became angry. My swearing — which is usually reserved for cheap online Mario Strikers opponents who just love to use Dry Bones and Toad dekes against my goalie — was deemed largely unnecessary when I got back to the Wii. The system update, you see, was complete; a parental warning was staring me in the face telling me that the Internet was a bad place and that Dateline NBC was probably outside my door catching a predator or ten.

That’s all chaff though. Unimportant banter. Why? Because as soon as the update was complete I wasn’t thinking at all about the Internet Channel, or the Weather Channel or the News Channel (although I did check the New Channel to see if my Wii’s online connection was intact). What I immediately thought was “who the hell cares?”

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Nintendo Corporation now expects to ship 16.5 million Wiis and 26 million DSes by March 2008, reports GamesIndustry.biz. These figures are up from Nintendo’s previous projections at 14 million Wiis and 22 million DSes.

For those of you keeping score at home, the official count at the end of June 2007 is now 9.27 million Wiis and 47.27 DSes sold. Chris Hecker is no doubt very disappointed in all of you.

The mountain of Nintendo grows ever higher this morning as Reuters (via CNET, via Enterbrain) reports that the plucky little Wii has bested the obsidian monolith PS3 by a ratio of 6:1.And the best part? Wii’s momentum is going UP month over month.

Nintendo sold 270,974 units of the Wii in the four weeks ended June 24, compared with 41,628 units for the PS3 and 17,616 units for Microsoft’s Xbox 360, according to data from Enterbrain.

The Wii’s lead against the PS3 was 4 to 1 in April and 5 to 1 in May.

Hey, at least Sony still has Australia, right?

[Image courtesy of Aeropause]

Seems like putting a soothing blue light in the loading slot was a better business decision than including a pricey “blue-rayed” high def DVD player. Why? Because there’s more evidence out today that Nintendo was crazy like a fox for not including DVD capability in the Wii.

Gamasutra:

According to new research by The Diffusion Group, though 80 percent of console owners have the option, only 30 percent realized it was part of its feature set, and only 13 percent actually utilize it - more stats inside.

The new report, ‘On the Use of Game Consoles for Movie Viewing’, which surveyed 2000 U.S. homes, says that 74 percent of households rely solely on standalone DVD players for watching movies, while a quarter have gone online to purchase or rent digital movie downloads.

I think I’ve probably reached ad nauseum levels when it comes to criticizing the “video game console as a complete media center is a woefully failed strategy” but since it’s fun and I love schadenfreund schadenfreude so much, I’m going to continue it here today. (more…)

NPD just announced US hardware numbers for the month of May. They are as follows:

1. DS - 423,000 units
2. Wii - 338,000 units
3. PSP - 221,000 units
4. PS2 - 188,000 units
5. 360 - 155,000 units
6. PS3 - 82,000 units
7. GBA - 81,000 units
8. GCN - 10,000

DS sales solid and steady, Wii down slightly (though still selling a grundle), and the PSP benefited nicely from its recent price drop. Looks almost exactly like every other month over the last half year, so I’m not even going to say anything ’cause everything has already been said, no?

According to Nintendo, 40% of Wii users have gone online. Assuming that the total number of people that bought internet strictly for their Wii (not likely) and/or are “borrowing” their neighbor’s wireless signal (more likely than you’d think) adds up to a generous 5% of Wii owners, this means that at least a third of Wii users have a computer, a router, a broadband internet connection, and a willingness to go online with their console. That demographic is ideal for online gaming.

While probably only a tenth or less of plugged-in Wii users would regularly play online games if they were handled on a per-game basis and quietly tucked away within each game’s title menu with nary a word spoken hence, a focused campaign from Nintendo to connect its Wii users in a centralized service - maybe dress it up extra adorable, smattered with Miis and smarm - could crack the typically-reclusive “casual market” open like an egg. And soon, God willing, most of the world could be shrieking racial epithets into their headsets.

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Due to my love for oversimplified graphs, I give to you old-gen hardware sales compared to next-gen hardware sales in delicious pie graph form. Nintendo should be sending me checks for all this market research I’m doing in support of their strategy. Data was taken from the NPD, North America’s hardware bean counter. Definitions are as follows:

• Old-gen category includes all reported systems selling inferior graphics and processing power namely DS, Wii, PS2, PSP, GameCube, and GameBoy Advance.
• Next-gen category includes all reported systems selling up-to-date graphics and processing power, namely 360 and PS3.

I find the result pretty astounding. Granted, I was unable to produce the same figures 18 months after the Dreamcast and PS2 first launched (data not publicly available), but I’d be surprised if old-gen hardware was outselling next-gen hardware by this much circa the early 2000s. Penny for your thoughts?

To steal a term coined by Kotaku, I put together the above charticle juxtaposing the first six month console sales of Wii, 360, PS3, PS2, Xbox, and GameCube. First, the Wii has sold better than the mighty PS2 after the first six months. Amazingly, both the PS3 and 360 sold worse than the GameCube for the same period (!). Cumulative first six month totals in units sold are as follows: (more…)

The DS and Wii outsold the competition in that order yet again for the month of April; the DS selling a whopping 417K units with the Wii selling 360K units. GBA even managed to outsell the PS3 by 4,000 units at 84k. From a competitve console standpoint, the 360 sold an unimpressive 176K units considering the seven year old PS2 outsold it yet again. Oh, and Nintendo games made up the top four selling games last month. Impressive. How long before someone says “it will still fade?”

UPDATE: The PSP continues to sell surprisingly well at 183k units. Very interesting. Also, given slow “next-gen” sales (read: PS3, 360), how long before a Microsoft price drop puts the pressue on Nintendo, if at all?

Respected Japanese publication Famitsu announced today that Nintendo hit the 10 million sold milestone in Japan for the DS Lite. It also did it in record time selling more than two times faster than the mega-selling PS2 for the same period.

Not sure how high the total is including DS phats, but I would have sweared this would have been more. Don’t the Japanese buy like a half mil of these things per day?