http://www.nintendo.co.jp/ir/en/library/events/121025/03.html

Looks like Nintendo games have made about $500m since April 2007. That may not sound like much, but it comes to about 70 million games at $7-$8 a pop, and I don't think this includes third party games.

From The Source's link

"This graph shows the transitions of download sales so far. They were soaring up until three years ago, but were not able to rise for the past two years.
As you can see, however, the sales in the first half of this fiscal year were up 50% from a year ago and nearly reached the level of the highest sales ever in the first half of the fiscal term three years ago. It was the time we shipped 56.14 million units of the Wii system and 10.17 million units of the Nintendo DSi system in total, and both platforms were actively used. Considering that we have sold only 22.19 million units of the Nintendo 3DS system and it is still during its spread period, you can see our digital business has stronger momentum than at that time. The current sales growth is due to the sales of add-on content and the digital download sales of packaged software that we started in July."

Now I wonder, given that even they aknowledge that the growth in this year comes from retail games available to donwload and dlc (basically the new Mario and Brain Training games), why they have launched the WiiU with so little storage? There clearly is a demand for download games.

Oh, well. Nice numbers, we'll see how the launch of WiiU and more 3DS games being available to download increase those numbers.

I think these numbers more or less confirm that in terms of "total new games bought" digital and retail, Wii is probably going to top 1b units fairly easily (should be over 900m already with digital), and DS may get there too.

Looks like the policy of killing VC releases in favor of more My Notebooks did not pay off. I, for one, am shocked.

What VC stuff is missing?  Any big ones?  Or are you more talking about the end of the slow trickle?

The slow trickle. Releases of new titles used to be pretty consistent, but shortly after WiiWare's release new games slowed to a trickle. I suppose I could revise my statement to include "good" WiiWare titles, although those also became increasingly rare over time.

Wow, Ninty sure knows how to sell games.

I agree, I wanna play some GBA games on my Wii U. That would be fantastic. Are the Pokemon GBA games on virtual console for the 3DS?

Nintendo don't do technical solutions. If there's something they can code to make people's lives easier they deliberately avoid it.

In all seriousness, it appears that they're really just lazy. The Wii U's Virtual Console is literally going to be the Wii's Virtual Console, because they don't want to re-program and re-test the emulators/games.  I'd imagine similar reasoning goes into why they're separating the 3DS' Virtual Console from the Wii/Wii U one.

Well, that and greed, of course.