I’m starting to sound like a broken record, but Nintendo once again dominated the US sales charts. For the month of January, Nintendo sold 679,000 Wiis and 511,000 DSes. Compare it to the opposition and it seems even more ridiculous. The next biggest seller was the Xbox 360 on 309,000, with the PS3 following on 203,000 with PSP and PS2 further back on 172,000 and 101,000 units respectively.
Comparisons with last year’s sales are even more striking - Wii was up 405,000 year-on-year (almost a 150% increase), with DS up 259,000 (just over 100%). The only other console to post improved figures on last January’s totals was the 360 (up 79,000). The rest all had noticeable losses.
On the software front, Wii Fit’s UK success was mirrored in the US, with Americans buying it in their droves, presumably to wobble off those excess Christmas and Thanksgiving pounds. At 777,000 sales, itsold more copies than the second and third place games put together, coincidentally two more Wii titles in Wii Play and Mario Kart Wii. Guitar Hero World Tour at 7, New Super Mario Bros at 8 and Mario Kart DS at 9 were the other Nintendo console representatives.
As for industry growth, figures were up $150 million from last year, of which $300 million was down to Nintendo’s own growth. Maths gone seriously wrong? Not at all - the big N’s improvements offset losses on rival platforms. Amazing.
After much wailing and gnashing of teeth on my part about the extreme unlikelihood of us Europeans getting our hands on Another Code: R, along comes a PDF detailing Nintendo’s financial results briefing for the year, and my hopes are suddenly raised.
Scroll down to page 8 of the report, and you’ll see a launch schedule of primary Nintendo products for 2009. Now this list is clearly incomplete, but CiNG’s Wiiquel is definitely on the European schedule, with the release date given simply as ‘2009′.
Also of interest is the DS list, which suggests Rhythm Paradise (changed from Heaven due to religious concerns, perhaps?) will hit Europe in the first half of the calendar year. The Wii list also has Punch-Out!! down for release before June.
Now, it’s too early to start celebrating just yet, but I’d assume that if a European release wasn’t at least considered for Another Code: R, then it wouldn’t show up on the list. I’ve fired off an email to Nintendo UK to ask if anyone can confirm the information, but haven’t had a response as yet.
More tidbits of info: Endless Ocean 2 is another conspicuous absencee from the North America listing though it remains on the schedule for Europe. And somehow, Pokemon Platinum has shifted ten thousand units outside Japan. Lots more facts, figures and tentative release dates here.
Eurogamer has reported that the DS is some way ahead of its handheld rival in the UK, having outsold PSP in 2008 by 5:1.
In a rare dribble of proper sales information from the normally vague Chart-Track, 3.4 million DSes found their way into UK households last year, compared with 600,000 PSPs. That’s 8.8 million units in total to date, which means more money to spend on ads with Girls Aloud and the Redknapps. Let’s have Harry playing Hotel Dusk next - sales would undoubtedly spike for CING’s noir-tinged adventure.
Meanwhile, we got installed base figures for the Wii - apparently 4.9 million waggly wonder-machines have been purchased since launch, which puts Xbox 360 firmly in second place with 3.2 million, with Sony’s PS3 on 1.9 million. Welcome to the third place, indeed.
Will 2009 continue to be the year of the Wii, or will Nintendo’s bubble burst? With MotionPlus on the way (alongside the sequel to the best-selling game of all time in Wii Sports Resort), not to mention the DSi for fans of portable gaming, I’m betting on the former.
Some people claim Nintendo’s success is harming the games industry. Electronic Entertainment Design and Research (EEDAR) thinks the opposite, claiming the Kyoto giant ’saved Christmas’ during a time when most industries were suffering from the global recession.
GI.biz carries a report that the company’s Jesse Divnich suggested the Wii sold over 3.2 million units throughout December - a record figure.
Meanwhile, EEDAR estimated DS sales as 3 million units, representing a 21% increase year-on-year. Wii’s rise was a whopping 137% - mainly thanks to demand far outstripping supply in 2007.
Though Divnich hints that Wii could have performed even better. “For December 2008, we project that the Wii would have likely sold north of 4 million units had supply and demand been in equilibrium,” he suggested.
Wii’s total was more than twice its nearest home console rival, with Microsoft’s Xbox 360 selling just over 1.5 million consoles, with Sony’s PlayStation 3 struggling to 700,000 units - a 12% drop on the previous year.
On the software front, Wii games took three of the top four positions, with Wii Play the likely Christmas number one, with Mario Kart Wii and Wii Fit joining the 360 version of Call of Duty: World at War on the best-seller list.
Incredible. Unprecedented. Unbe-flippin-lievable. Roll out all the superlatives you like, they can’t come close to describing Wii’s staggering performance this November, the console shifting a whopping 600,000 units more than even the lofty predictions of Wedbush Morgan analyst Michael Pachter.
Wii more than doubled the still-impressive sales of Microsoft’s Xbox 360, which reached a very respectable figure of 836,000, while Sony slunk home with its tail between its legs, with PS3 lagging way behind on 378,000. Sub-400k in November? Ouch.
In the handheld market, DS showed its clear dominance over its widescreen rival, with over 1.5 million flip-top portables flying off the shelves, dwarfing PSP’s total of 421,000.
Recession? Pah! Nintendo sneered in the face of the credit crunch by posting record sales of its insanely popular handheld for the week ending December 6th, says MCV.
It broke its own record, which was set a year and one week earlier, and that record beat the incredible launch week sales of the PSP in September 2005, back when Sony’s handheld looked set to conquer the world. How times change.
Chart-Track reckons the DS might yet beat this week’s sales in the run-up to Christmas assuming Nintendo’s supply can keep up with the frothing demand. Now if only Nintendo could ramp up production of Professor Layton and the Curious Village, we’d almost certainly have an undeniable classic as the Christmas number one this year, as prices of the prof’s much-sought-after first adventure reach a crazy £75.99 on Amazon. I love Brain Training as much as the next man, but I’m getting a little tired of seeing Kawashima’s grinning mug leering down from the upper echelons of the All-Formats Top 40.
Professor Layton’s third DS adventure easily tops the Japanese charts, outselling nearest rival PES 2009 (or Winning Eleven in Japan) by 2:1, and knocking previous leader Animal Crossing: City Folk down to third spot. Crosso suffers a serious hit to its sales, with a drop to 108,547 units this week - no news on whether that’s down to low stock, or perhaps it could be that the Japanese are realising just how similar it is to the DS game (or indeed that it’s better suited to handheld play).
Elsewhere, Chrono Trigger hangs in there in fourth position, though in the lower positions it’s the PSP show, Sony’s handheld proving very popular in the east at the moment. Yet in the hardware charts, DSi still rules the roost. Though with such impressive software sales - and for some pretty hardcore-friendly titles too - the PSP is proving a worthy competitor. That particular battle is going to rage on well into next year. Meanwhile, Wii continues to outsell its home console rivals, though the PS3 had a strong week again - whether that will start to catch up as 2009 goes on remains to be seen, but with Tatsunoko vs. Capcom out next week, I expect a sales spike for Wii as we head into the festive period.
The full charts follow:
1. NDS - Layton 3 - 347,360 / NEW
2. PS3 - PES 2009 - 168,405 / NEW
3. WII - Animal Crossing - 108,547 / 413,727
4. NDS - Chrono Trigger - 80,157 / 351,025
5. PSP - Yu-Gi-Oh Tag Force 3 - 64,179 / NEW
6. PSP - Gundam vs. Gundam - 56,557 / 323,489
7. NDS - Kirby Superstar Ultra - 56176 / 474,749
8. PSP - Kenka Banchou 3 - 53,966 / NEW
9. PSP - Musou Orochi: Maou Sairin - 45,809 / NEW
10. PSP - Higurashi Daybreak - 32,639 / NEW
Or 535,379 units to be exact, according to Kotaku. It’s a very healthy start for the new console, though it doesn’t quite eclipse its predecessor - in its first month on sale, the DS Lite shifted over 550,000 handhelds.
This means that the DS in its various guises has now sold 24,239,590 units in its country of origin, with some clear daylight now between the dual-screened portable and its nearest competitor, the (almost-)all-conquering PS2.
There’s still no confirmed date for the DSi’s appearance in Europe and the US, but then the DSL is still doing very well in both territories, whereas Nintendo acted quickly in Japan to halt the rise of the PSP. With Sony’s handheld comfortably behind the DS everywhere else, it could be quite some time before we’re messing about with pictures and music and downloading applications from the DSiWare service.
Well, it does if we’re going off the ‘individual format’ charts, where games which are released over eight different consoles don’t count, anyway.
But yes, Mario Kart Wii - almost eight months after its initial release - is back at the top of the charts, no doubt helped by the irresistible appeal of the Redknapp clan and the screech of “aww, ah lav bee’in yewwww” from her-what-used-to-be-in-Eternal in the current UK telly ads. Of course, what the ad fails to note is that Mario Kart Wii actually offers the worst local multiplayer in any home console Mario Kart to date, and that online twelve-player races is actually where it’s at. Still, I’ll concede that it’s a lot of fun if you’ve got plenty of casual gamer friends and three Wii Wheels, and it is the most accessible in the series to date. Yay for the ‘expanded audience’. Sort of.
Elsewhere, lovely lovely Wii Music hangs on in there at seven, only just outsold by PS3 big-hitter Resistance 2 in the latter’s launch week. Does this mean the British public has taken Miyamoto’s latest creation under its collective wing? Let’s hope it does better over here than in the US and Japan…
Kawashima’s at 3, Wii Play’s at 4 and Wii Fit is at 8, all months or even years after being launched. Pretty amazing scenes, all told - with all of these games going at least double-platinum, it seems Nintendo has cracked the formula for extending a game’s shelf life.
That’s a lot of peripherals and a lot of money right there. But yes, according to a report on Eurogamer, both titles soared past the total needed to secure diamond status, which represents the kind of figures most other games would be extremely envious of (and probably make snide comments about the size of Mario Kart’s arse while doing so). Indeed, the hugely popular Grand Theft Auto IV could only manage double-platinum - a comparatively paltry 600,000 copies, though admittedly it did that for both currently available versions, so the sales might compare favourably with the two aforementioned Nintendo titles.
Elsewhere, Big Brain Academy (the DS version) reached double-platinum status while Super Smash Bros. Brawl reached single-platinum, with over 300,000 units shifted. A quick scan for Super Mario Galaxy reveals that still holds platinum status, though its star has risen faintly of recent weeks with Nintendo’s recent advertising blitz seeing it shift a few more copies. Can it reach double-platinum?
 
 
 
 
 
 
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