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Starting from Jan 1st 2008 up to November 9th 2008, roughly 10.7 million games were sold for the Wii among 100 titles that charted.

Of those 10.7 million games, 8.7 million were first party games distributed among 28 games (Avrg 310k units/game), of which 13 were new games and 15 older games. This means 81.3% of all games sold in Japan were first party. New games accounted for 4.7 million units (Avrg 316k units/game), while older games accounted for another 4 million units (Avrg 266k units/game).
What's more interesting, out of the 10.7 million, 8 million were attributed to MKWii + Wii Fit + SSBB + Wii Sports + Wii Play + SMG + Mario Party 8 + Link's Bowgun Training + Wii Music + Super Mario Stadium, which equals 75% of all Wii games sold.
If we remove MKWii and SSBB out of the new releases, the average units/game drops dramatically for new releases, from 316k to 100k.


Third party companies sold a combined total of 2 million games, 19.7% of all games.
This 2 million games were distributed among 72 games (Avrg 27k units/game), of which 38 were new games and 34 were older games. New games accounted for 1.4 million games (Avrg 37k units/game)  while older ones for the remaining 600k games (Avrg 17.5k units/game).
The best selling 3rd party game sold 248k units, which is less than the average 1st party game. A thing to note is that most of the 3rd party games for the Wii this year bombed badly in Japan and PS3 3rd party games handidly outsold the Wii ones.


Wii is on a tough decline in Japan, not even 1st party games are selling that good anymore. When 10 out of 100 games make up the 75% of the total sales, and all of them are 1st party there's something that's not right. In Japan, the "only first party games sell on the Wii" generalization is valid, and it gets worse when you know that the PS3 has sold more 3rd party software this year with a userbase of almost one third of the Wii. Expect this ratio to grow even more with Animal Crossing City Folk release. Also, when 2 out of 13 new games make up more than 75% of all the sales of the new 1st party games, it also tells us that Japanese gamers aren't even buying 1st party games anymore.

Wii may be losing steam way too fast in their homeland, and by next year things can only get worse, given the fact that outside Wii Sports: Resort, there's no other big game getting released there, being 1st or 3rd party.



Proud poster of the 10000th reply at the Official Smash Bros Update Thread.

tag - "I wouldn't trust gamespot, even if it was a live comparison."

Bets with Conegamer:

Pandora's Tower will have an opening week of less than 37k in Japan. (Won!)
Pandora's Tower will sell less than 100k lifetime in Japan.
Stakes: 1 week of avatar control for each one.

Fullfilled Prophecies