Well, he did do a good job of covering every little chink in the Wii's armor, even if he utterly failed to see the larger picture.

For example, 5 out of the top 10 selling Japanese console games of 2009 are Wii titles, compared to 6 out of 10 in 2008. Not exactly the software collapse it's made out to be.

And explosive US sales are certainly a big factor in why Nintendo is getting a smaller share of its revenue from Japan. A more actually useful comparison would be revenue from Nintendo products versus revenue from Playstation products in Japan.

Another reason I think 2009 sales won't pick up to catch 2008 is that you have the current deficit of 700k units and in 2008 1 year ago exactly Mario Kart Wii released in Japan.
So April 2009 vs April 2008 is going to be terrible too...

LOL

Nintendo starts to cool down... then DSi sells 400k+ in others and Wii sells 200k+ a week, yeah... thats slowing down.

PS3 + 360 must be at a standstill...

@Ail

Why do you think Wii Music wasn´t as successful as Nintendo was predicting/hoping?

Or maybe for once we should all stop "over" analyzing every little thing that is printed that does not agree with this website "personal" opinion. It is a article that is there to inform not change your mind. Hopefully this article is wrong, if it is right then I "told" you so is in order. Otherwise every wii owner should go out and buy madworld for goodness sake, it deserves much better sales then it got so far.

It probably would be more usefull to know how many units those 5 games in the top 10 have sold lol, being first among the last doesn't mean much...

The Wii had several million sellers in 2008, I don't think any of those 5 games you mention in 2009 are anywhere near that mark....( Q1 2008 had SSBB, Q2 2008 had Mario Kart). Now we can sure hope there are better released lined up for the rest of the year but they are going to have a tough job doing anywhere near what those 2 games did ( Wii Fit sold an ass load of copies in Japan in 2008 too).

Remember this is the Wall Street journal, they are trying to guess how Nintendo stock will fare based on the potential growth of the company within the next 2-5 years. This ain't the newspaper you pick up at the corner of the street...

How could it be successful when it was up against games like guitar hero and rock band?  The game really had no chance against the much more polished and supported competitors.

I have no clue at all.

All I'm saying is that people hoping releases later in the year are going to help the Wii do as well as in 2008 are probably hoping a bit too much, 2008, aside from the Medium Chrismas period ( whose effect is actually really felt on console sales in Q1 2009) was a dream year for software in Japan for Nintendo....

I get your point.  However, the decrese in sales will be due to the overall console market trend, not the fact that Nintendo is "cooling down".  PS3 saw a decline in sales in 2008 compared to 2007 as well (1.2M in '07 to 1M in '08), so it is not Wii "cooling down", it is the console market "cooling down".

True, but I don't think it does a lot of good to a Nintendo stockholder to know that the Sony Stockholder is suffering too....

Part of the Wall Street journal job is to identify which companies are hot and which will be hot for the foreseable future.....

If the Japan situation was to spill over the rest of the world Nintedo might move from being a Google like to an Oracle like...( stable good revenue but no crazy growth) and probably the Nintendo stock valuation would fall back to more acceptable levels....