This question is being posted in response to Marvelous crying about wii sales of their games.
Wii currently has 50.8M sold around the world.
The top 4 games compromise the most archetypal example of Nintendo's expanded audience strategy.
| 1 |
 |
Wii Sports |  |
Nintendo | 1,480 | N/A | 45.57m | 23rd May 09 |
| 2 |
 |
Wii Play | |
Nintendo | 809 | N/A | 23.50m | 27th Feb 09 |
| 3 |
 |
Wii Fit | |
Nintendo | 2,170 | N/A | 20.14m | 23rd May 09 |
| 4 |
 |
Mario Kart Wii Read the review |
|
Nintendo | 2,231 | 8.7 | 16.19m | 20th Aug 08 |
Here are some things we can draw from these 4 games and their sales:
1. Wii sports and the Mii character gaming are the fundamental backbone of the Nintendo experience to which "new" gamers are introduced.
Wii Play, aka: Hajimete no Wii (はじめてのWii, lit. "Starting with the Wii"), backs up this assertion.
2. Wii play should be the exactly what most owners are looking for, as it comes with an extra controller for about 5-10$ extra. From this we can guess that either 28M do not own a second controller, did not find value in Wii Play, or are unaware of the bundle.
3. Wii fit, is currently sold to 20M consumers. How many of these owners also buy other games is not known.
4. MKWii is interesting in that it appeals to both old time fans, and new expanded audience fans due to it's ease.
.
| 5 |
 |
Super Smash Bros. Brawl Read the review |
|
Nintendo | 1,130 | 9.2 | 8.47m | 05th Mar 09 |
| 6 |
 |
Super Mario Galaxy Read the review |
|
Nintendo | 1,845 | 9.6 | 7.98m | 12th May 09 |
| 7 |
 |
Mario & Sonic at the Olympic Games | |
Sega | 530 | N/A | 6.96m | 22nd Feb 09 |
| 8 |
 |
Mario Party 8 | |
Nintendo | 279 | N/A | 6.56m | 01st Feb 08 |
| 9 |
 |
The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess Read the review |
|
Nintendo | 713 | 9.3 | 5.28m | 09th Jan 09 |
This is where things get interesting.
The next 5 games on the list are relatively traditional Nintendo fan games, with the exception of the Olympics game, which still however features Mario and old time rival Sonic. I will be talking about these games as a group, but it is worth noting that I do not include M&S in any of that.
The top two, are easily the most popular of the Nintendo franchises, save for Mario Kart. Here is what we notice:
1. The top two each carry about 8M in sales and the average for these top titles averages about 7M
2. After Zelda, we see the biggest drop in sales for the next highest game, which acts as a good divider.
That game is Guitar Hero and is roughly 4.2M in sales
3. Because these games, which are all main installments of each franchise, sold an average of 7M, we will make an assertion that this number represents the traditional "core" gamers. (Core being defined by the buying habits of past purchasers) This is an important number which will be used later for other ideas.
Let's take that "traditional core" number and add it to the wii fit owner number, under the assumption that those two groups know what they want and seldome buy things they don't, given a certain amount of variability. There of course will be some overlap, but it has been noted by several people that sole ownership of wii fit is common. Given the smaller 3rd party IP sales and "expanded audience" game sales, we will assume that the "traditional core" seldom leaves it's demographic.
Together, that gives us 28 Million. What is interesting, is that the sales of these two games shows an almost constant rate
| Weeks ago | wii fit+SMG |
Wii Play | total/ total wii sold |
| 10 | 25.8M | 22.7 | 48.5/48.6 |
|
20 |
22.5M |
21.2 |
43.7/45.2 |
| 30 | 17 | 16.7 | 33.7/36 |
