Wii Sports: The New No. 1 Game
by Christina Lee on January 8th, 2009
Wii Sports has become the best-selling video game ever – a feat accomplished in just two months and two weeks.
VG Chartz, a video game sales tracking Web site, calculated that 40.2 million units of Wii Sports have been sold – surpassing long-time chart topper Super Mario Bros. Like Wii Sports, Nintendo sold Super Mario Bros. bundled with a console, that being the first Nintendo Entertainment System in 1985.
Nintendo has yet to confirm the unit sales numbers that VG Chartz has calculated, though its annual fiscal report states that it sold 1.484 billion Wii software units by March 2008. The company also sold 24.5 million consoles by then – an amount that has since doubled – while Microsoft sold 28 million Xbox units only by this month.
Since its 2006 release, the combined forces of the Wii and Wii Sports have lured in even the casual video game player. As total industry sales in the third quarter jumped to $2.91 billion, according to market researcher NPD Group, the two also led industry sales through a tough holiday season – in turn, surpassing expectations of even veteran video game reporter Steven Kent.
Kent told USA Today last year that he thought “the Wii bubble would burst any day” – that is, unless the company could deliver another game with such wide appeal, as he explained to Wired about two weeks later.
But today, Kent admits he was wrong.
“The Nintendo Wii not only survived the rest of 2007, it was the clear winner of 2008,” he wrote on his blog. Kent still wonders though if Wii Sports can continue to peak interests as the rest of the Wii game line remains comparatively lackluster.
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January 30th, 2009
at 9:14 am