wow just reading the first page of this like what the hell are you lot on? then i realised its from 08 aha

well with the Wii selling as it is right now and WiiU around the corner that will all but kill what little sales the Wii currently has i see it ending around 100mil-104mil

Good thread indeed.

200m has always been a little out of reach, I don't think any console ever will reach that number. Unless we end up with only only one console sometime in the future. It's just too much. 150m would have been my guess at the start of this generation. Too bad Nintendo dropped it quite suddenly and now it still hasn't reached 100m yet.

How many years did it take PS2 to reach 100m? Maybe Wii can still take that record. I think Wii is just about able to touch it this holiday, getting to like 100.1m or something.

I agree with some others here that it still should be able to get to 110m-120m if Nintendo plays their cards right. They should cut the price to $/€99 soon and start supporting other regions, basically do it PS2-style. Maybe even go to $/€79 in the distant future. This also goes for the DS, which should be able to get to 170m-180m this way. If there's one thing Sony did right, it's handling the PS2's death.

Seeing how sales momentum for Wii dropped dramatically a few years ago, and considering how bad the system is selling right now, I believe Wii will reach a maximum of 110-115 million units world wide.

I'm quite certain that Nintendo could have reached 150 million easily with existing hardware if they had deployed a somewhat different strategy. I don't see the hardware limitations as the main reason behind the dramatic drop in sales. I'd rather say that value compared to price, was the most devastating blow. Initially consumers considered Wii to have a much higher value compared to its competitors. It combined the lowest retail price with the most unique gaming experience. But as prices went down considerably for PS3 and Xbox360, combined with the fact that Wii over time lost it's uniqueness, the playing field changed.

Nintendo overestimated their product, eventually leading to an arrogant pricing of the system. If Nintendo had lowered the price as soon as PS3 and Xbox360 gained momentum, the Wii could have remained the top selling system for a much longer period, simply by denying competitors a fair chance to compete. The year 2009, which I believe was the first turning point this generation, could have looked much different with such a strategy.

The second turning point came when Sony and Microsoft adopted their products to motion control. Nintendo was clearly caught with their pants down, and had too little to put against that. Consumers saw new and sometimes even better motion control for Xbox360 and PS3. Nintendo should have prevented the competition from getting this advantage by including Wii Motion Plus as a standard controller by the time Sony and Microsoft rolled in their motion control.

The third turning point came because Nintendo was unwilling to eat into Sony's and Microsoft's main market. Nintendo should at least have released a WiiHD around Christmas 2010, instead of giving Sony and Microsoft an cheap argument for consumers to buy Xbox360 and PS3. Such an upgrade could have been possible with existing hardware architecture, and not require dramatic hardware changes.

Nintendo also failed with their online strategy for Wii, but I don't think that failure had a major impact on its sales because most die hard online players, had already dismissed Wii because of it's hardware limitations.

Even though Wii must be considered a huge success for Nintendo, I can't help to think about what sales the system really could have generated if Nintendo had stayed offensive in 2009 and beyond, instead of adopting a defensive approach. My conclusion is that Wii never reached its fullest potential.

I guess this thread shows that you cannot rely on just what you see to accurately predict the future sales of the system. This can easily be applied to those who made the comments on the PS Vita sales page.

The wii will be dead to Nintendo and developers by the end of 2013. There is no way it will sell 100 million, 50 million, hell even 15 million by then. Not happening, the wii is currently selling less than the PSP.

The wii u is around the corner, people have had their fill with the wii, they are moving on and so is Nintendo.
One of the reasons the wii dropped so bad compared to the ps2 end of gen is because Nintendo don't sell to as many countries as Sony did the ps2, Sony have loads of distributors.
So for Nintendo when the major western countries jump ship then the console suffers greatly. So the wii won't prosper as much as the ps2 did once the next gen begins.

And just as easily to those who made dumb statements on the 3DS sales a year ago....

On Topic: Haha, Wii didn't even reach 200 million, what a bust lol

I got through about half the page before I realized as well. Lol. I thought these people were crazy. The PS3 not even hitting half of 40 million...(but it is already at 66 million, I said to myself), then I saw some of the predictions...(35 million TOTAL for PS3? 45 million for 360??? WHAT?). Craziness.

Lesson learned here...check the date of posts. I nearly choke don my gum reading some of these predictions. Then I get to page three and say "oooooooh". It is funny to think how differently the market was viewed four years ago. While the Wii fell short of lofty numbers (it did fine) the PS3 and X360 did manage to do much better than imagined so mixed results there.

Damn, it's like opening a time capsule.
Good stuff.

Nicely done on the trip to memory lane.