Nintendo Wii Fanboy

Every week, sales charts show us that Wii Fit is popular among Japanese gamers. To give you a sense of just how well it's doing, though, Enterbrain recently reported that two million copies of the fitness title have been sold in Japan. Matched with recent reports of six million Wii consoles being sold in the region, that means every one in three Japanese Wii owners bought a copy of Wii Fit.

It hasn't yet caught up to its Nintendo cousin, Wii Sports, which has almost reached the three million mark. Yet, keep in mind that 1) Wii Fit was released a year after Wii Sports and 2) Wii Fit is a lot more expensive; it costs more than a usual Wii game, while Wii Sports costs less than the standard. To throw in another interesting comparison, Media Create sales indicate that there are almost as many Wii Fit owners in Japan as PS3 owners (with the PS3 currently having a 50,000 unit edge).

While we find it unlikely that Wii Fit will hit the same one-in-three ownership ratio in Europe and North America, we have little doubt that the exercise software will do well in those regions, too. Let it be said that Nintendo definitely understands the casual market.



[Via NeoGAF]

Super Smash Bros. Brawl unleashed the mother of all Final Smashes on the Japanese charts last week by selling 820,000 copies in four days. Now, Famitsu publisher Enterbrain says Nintendo's scrapper (released eleven days ago) has topped the one million sales mark, and passed another Wii flagship title in the process: Super Mario Galaxy (released almost three and a half months ago). That's crazy.

To be fair to Galaxy, it's far from the only game to be left spluttering in Brawl's dust. Next-gen notes that Wii Fit took seven weeks to pass a million sales, that Wii Sports passed the landmark after eleven weeks, and that Wii Play and Mario Party 8 are the only other Wii titles to top a million units in Japan.

According to Japanese information giant Enterbrain, even with reduced sales in August, the Wii crushed the other consoles in that nation. And by crushed here, we mean humiliated. We're not usually one to rub it in, but when you're talking combined sales of the PS3 and Xbox 360 not totaling half of Wii sales, things are getting a little silly. In the weeks leading up to August 26, Wii sales outnumbered the PS3 at a ratio of 3:1, and sales of the 360, which has always struggled in Japan, were barely a blip on the radar.

For a full chart tracking console sales in Japan since last December, stomp past the break, Godzilla-style.

Japanese media giant Enterbrain recently surveyed retailers, as reported by Gamefront.de, about their expectations for game system sales this holiday season. We know you're not surprised, but right now? The show is all Nintendo.

Retailers were asked, "Which next generation console do you think will sell better this Christmas?" The results lean heavily toward Nintendo -- 88% thought the Wii would boast better sales, and 11% settled on the PS3. We're not sure if it's worse that Microsoft wasn't even listed (perhaps because the Xbox 360 was released last year) or that Sony only garnered 11% in the poll.

The Wii loses, however, when it comes to all systems ... because 60% of retailers queried thought the Nintendo DS would be the top dog of all holiday console sales. Only 32.8% chose the Wii ... and a shocking 3.3% picked the PS3.

Japanese publishing company Enterbrain has tossed their hat into the analyst ring with a new set of longterm predictions on the outcome of the console war in Japan. President Hirokazu Hamamura predicts that the Wii will sell for about 20,000 yen and $170 in the U.S., and that over the next five years, the Wii will move 10 million units in Japan. This far outstrips the 4 million GameCubes the article lists as having sold in Japan so far. Hamamura also puts the PS3 at similar numbers, predicting a draw between Sony and Nintendo in systems sold over the next five years.

The Xbox 360, they said, doesn't really have a chance for success in Japan. Ouch. These predictions are far different from those made for the U.S., which reflects the vast difference in market -- at least so far as Japanese underdog Microsoft is concerned.