Nintendo Releases Q3 Sales Data, Expects Third-Party Sales to Increase; Wii Sports Sells 12.5M Units

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New sales data released by Nintendo illustrates the company's fiscal year third quarter performance, broken down in hardware and software sales by region.

Nintendo's Wii hardware made its strongest showing at retail in the Americas, but software sales were around 15% higher in Europe. Meanwhile, DS hardware sales were strongest in Europe for the third quarter, but software sales in the Americas were roughly 45% higher.

Additionally, in transcripts of Nintendo's third quarter report meeting translated by Develop, the company said that it believes that the underperformance of third-party software on the Wii is only temporary, citing the console's short time on the market for in-house development's advantage over third-party software.

"Our software sales percentage is currently high because our internal teams teams know the Wii's special characteristics best, and they started development quite a bit before the Wii's release," the company said. "However, we believe that eventually that will change."

Nintendo added, "If you look at the data for our third quarter you'll see that, out of the 14 Wii titles that shipped over a million units, 11 of those were our titles. However, if you look at the 50 titles that shipped over a million units on DS, only 28 of those are ours."

New Super Mario Bros. (NDS) and Brain Age (NDS) both breached ten million in lifetime sales as of the end of the third quarter. Nintendogs remained Nintendo's highest-selling DS game, reaching 17.9 million units to date. Nintendo's Wii Sports sold 12.5 million units in the third quarter—a figure boosted by pack-in sales with the Wii hardware in Europe and the Americas. Wii Sports is sold individually in Japan.

From The Chatty
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    January 29, 2008 1:30 PM

    I'm hoping Nintendo is helping developers. For the DS, didn't they release multiple um... "helpful information packets" to developers to promote the development of games?

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