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.

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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

1 billion LTD

I assume the answer is 6 billion and coutning... :p

None.

Everyone who makes a game for the Wii is clearly an idiot because the majority dont play their games. Only Nintendo games and games like Deca Sports 2. Besides Wii already peaked in Japan PS3 is beat it a couple of time so yea its over its peaked time to move on to PS3.

Well to answer the question the wii's selling potential for the 'casual' blue ocean demographic is massive, greater than any console in the history of gaming. Wii fit is a testament to that. For the more traditional 'hardcore' titles however I would say the wii's selling potential is about the same as the 360's is in its core demographic. So essentially much less than the previous category but still a very high amount none the less.

The interesting thing to note is Mario Kart wii. If Nintendo is able to make games that were traditionally considered core games and expand them to a wider audience then I would say the wii's selling potential is much higher than the 360's or any other console. Since this has only been seen with one core title however it is yet to be seen if Nintendo can reproduce the effect with another one of their traditional titles. Of course there is also the group of gamers that would hate for this to happen as they would see it as a watering down of their favorite games.

@mendicate
thank you for your intelligent response.
I think Mario Kart did, in a sense, water down the gameplay slightly. That is, super moves were taken out of the game. Many will argue, and I agree, that supermoves introduced some imbalance to the game, but it was an additional feature, and summarily rejected for making the game too complicated.
It was a good move though, and nobody really misses them except for me T_T. The new Super mario should do the same thing, so we will see how the combination games work. It looks to me that MKWii sold to about 3/4ths of the traditional core, and nearly half of the new expanded audience (not wii fitters, in following with the original argument)

Hrm, I have trouble following some of your logic / conclusions. 

Can you do a similar example with the HD consoles? In particular, try the PS3. I just don't think this assertion makes much sense.

When you say "sole ownership of wii fit," does that mean that's the only game they have? The attach rate for the other 30mil owners would end up being ridiculously high. Not only that, but Wii Fit came out just last year, and has so far sold over 20mil. I mean, I know the game is a system seller, but that's seriously pushing it.

I'm not sure what the last part is supposed to mean, either. Are you implying all core gamers bought SMG? If anything, if those 3 added up close to the Wii's userbase, it should be proof there are far more than 8mil core gamers. I mean, the biggest attach rate we see on HD consoles (assumed to be all core gamers) is Halo 3, with ~1 game sold per 3 consoles.

The Wii's userbase is much more "Mainstream" than the other two consoles, and this means that the typical user is probably less likely to go searching on the internet to find obscure high quality games than other consoles; and even the more "Hardcore" userbases of the PS3 and XBox 360 do not have that many people who would be willing to do this.

What this means is that the brand associated with a game, word of mouth (and first hand experiences), and marketing are essential to the success of a Wii game ... Third party developers who have released games that have (at least) two of those qualities have seen decent sales or better. Unfortunately, far too many developers decide to drop brand new IPs on the Wii with minimal or no multiplayer gameplay on the Wii, and don't support it with any marketing which results in a game few users know about; and when they see it on the shelf they would not be likely to buy it.

I don't really understand how you can say that there are people with only Wii Fit. The Wii has a higher attach rate than the PS3 at 6.02. If the 20 million people with Wii Fit don't have any other games, that would mean the Attach rate for the rest of the Wii Audience would be closer to 9 or 10.

@theprof00

Exactly I too feel the Mario Kart Wii had the gameplay watered down slightly which is unfortunate. I'm interested how NSMB will do because of the new technology they are implementing where they allow the game to play itself for the parts the player is unable to pass. By doing this they can make the game play deep enough to satisfy the hardcore gamer and easy enough so that the casual gamer can have fun too. However they have to be very careful how they implement the technology so as not to turn off the core audience. I think if they give incentives for beating the game without using the help feature such as unlocking new challenge levels or characters they would keep the hardcore audience satisfied and give them a sense of accomplishment at the same time.