Nintendo Has Huge Year on Back of Wii, DS

And the company says that there is more to come.

Making the decision to buy a Wii is the easy part. Finding one is a whole separate story. This is not surprising, considering that Nintendo has already sold nearly 6 million of them since the system launched last November.

As part of its end-of-year financial statement released on Thursday, Nintendo revealed just how well the Wii and the DS have done in their relatively short lifespans.

Between last November, when the Wii debuted in North America, and the end of March, 5.84 million people bought a Wii, Nintendo said. And that's despite widely reported hardware shortages that one Nintendo executive warned recently could persist for some time.

But Nintendo clearly has a plan in mind for getting more into stores. The company is estimating that by the time next March comes, it will have sold another 14 million Wiis and 55 million games to go along with them.

As impressive as the Wii has been, the real success story has to be the DS, a system Nintendo attributes with bringing games to the masses through its Touch! Generations range of games.

As of the end of March, Nintendo had sold 40 million DSs, and it's expecting to add another 20 million to that figure by next spring.

The numbers finger Japan as the fiercest region for Nintendo, which has now sold 16 million DSs there. That's only a sliver less than the Game Boy Advance sold there in its entire lifetime. Pulling Japanese DS owners into stores is the latest pair of Pokémon games, which sold 5.2 million copies already.

It's not just the Japanese that are cozying up to the DS. Europeans and Americans are joining in too, sending game sales sky high.

Mario's latest 2D adventure in New Super Mario Bros has captured 9.5 million sales, a number bested by the 12 million copies of Dr Kawashima's Brain Training (and its sequel) and the 13 million copies of Nintendogs sold since their respective launches.

Alex Wollenschlaeger
Editor, Kikizo