What can Nintendo do at E3 to save the Wii?

[TheSource]

Wii is Nintendo's biggest software market for the next year, probably the next two years depending on how 3DS grows (not looking good) and how Wii 2 launches.  I don't know that they care about Wii hardware sales too much anymore so long as software sales remain strong.

That said, Wii sales should perk up quite a bit on the price cut. Look at the lift the PSP had in the USA after its February cut - and PSP has a hell of a lot less momentum in the USA than Wii does.

If you go by Nintendo's forecast, you'd expect a split of something like 1-1.5m Wiis in Japan/ 6.5m Wiis Americas / 5m - 5.5m Wiis in EMEAA. Essentially that's:

Americas: 10 Months at 350k shipped (3.5m), 1m in November, 2m in December. If you take the January - April avg of Wii in the USA, you get about 75,000 per week - I don't think 75k for the entirety of the Americas is too hard with a price cut. That's 6.5m.

EMEAA: 10 Months 300k shipped (3.0m), 750k in November, 1.65m in December. Again, not super high figures, doable with the price cut and some games. That's 5.3m.

Japan: 10 Months 60k shipped (600k), 400k (Dec), 200k (Jan).

For software, the 120m (and 11m copies of Mario Kart bundled) probably breaks down like this:

Mario Kart (bundled): 11m

DKCR, Wii Party, Epic Yarn, Metroid, Galaxy 2, other 2010 Nintendo SW: 10m

Wii Fit Plus, Wii Sports Resort, Wii Sports (debundled): 10m

Wii Play 2: 10m

Zelda: 8m

Kirby (Hal): 3m

Rhythm Heaven: 2m

Minor Nintendo Games: 2m

EA / Act / Ubisoft Games (excluding dancing): 20m

Just Dance 1-3 & Kids: 10m

Other Dancing / Fitness Games: 10m

Zumba Games: 5m

DQX: 4m (March 2012?)

Lego Games: 3m

Mario & Sonic: 3m

DQ Collection: 1m

...and then 20m for whatever is left. Probably 3-5m for other Japanese games, 5m for THQ games, and whatever else I missed. There could also be sales for big sequels for major Nintendo / third party content we don't know about yet.

The goal essentially isn't to push Wii back to 26m in a year, but to keep it as a big market. Wii / DS were a nearly 300m market last year for software - that won't dissappear overnight, so Nintendo's goal is simply to keep Wii / DS SW at relevant levels (>10m) for a while 3DS / Cafe come on as big markets.