Nintendo Doubles Its Fun with Wii, DS

Satoru Iwata says the release of the Wii has not had much effect on the portable juggernaut that is the DS.

There were smiles all around in the US when initial Wii sales figures were released. In just the first week, Nintendo sold Wiis to 600,000 people. Even more impressive (and representative of the hardcore skewing of the early adopter audience), Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess sold to around 450,000 of those new Wii owners. Things in Japan are a little different.

Slightly more than 350,000 people picked up a Wii at the Japanese launch this weekend, according to new numbers from Enterbrain. The top selling game was not Link's new adventure, though, but rather Wii Sports - the family friendly party pack of games already included with the system in the US and Europe.

Wii Sports sold around 176,000 copies, slightly more than the 174,000 copies sold of Nintendo's other minigame collection Wii Play, which also includes a Wii Remote.

Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess didn't sell best, but it did sell well. Over 139,000 people snapped up the game during the weekend.

Third party publishers will not like the look of the rest of the list though. Of the 15 games released, only four sold more than 20,000 copies and Nintendo made all of them. There have been accusations that outside developers aren't trying hard enough to use the Wii controller, but the poor sales of non-Nintendo games will not encourage them to do so.

A concern for some analysts and Nintendo watchers was that any success with the Wii would come at the expense of the DS, but Nintendo president Satoru Iwata points to the consistent sales of the DS over the past fortnight and concludes that there has been "little impact".

In fact, the DS has been selling like gangbusters. Nintendo expects to have sold 20 million of them by the end of March, and Iwata told Reuters that the portable "still has room for growth globally".

Europe will play a big part in that. The DS has been a consistent hit of late in Europe, with Nintendo recently announcing the portable is the best selling games hardware this year in the UK. Will the DS keep that run up once the Wii launches? We'll see on Friday when Nintendo's new console arrives across the region.

Alex Wollenschlaeger
Editor, Kikizo