Nintendo Wii is market leader in home console business

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Nintendo Wii is market leader in home console business



Vgchartz.com, the most comprehensive Videogame charts in the world has announced that lifetime sales of Nintendo's Wii have passed Microsoft's Xbox 360 on a worldwide basis as of August 23rd.

Two years ago, very few analysts would have predicted the Nintendo Wii would be market leader this generation against the established Playstation and Xbox brands. But analysts can be in error: Vgchartz.com data, which is based on sample data from retailers all over the world indicates that the week ending August 23rd Nintendo's Wii (which was released one year after the Xbox 360 in November 2006), currently standing at 10.57 million consoles sold, passed Xbox 360 lifetime sales of 10.51 million units, making Nintendo the new market leader in both the home and handheld videogame console businesses.

As weekly data from vgchartz.com shows(**), the console outsold Microsofts Xbox 360 by a margin of 2.3 : 1 worldwide on average each week since its release, selling at an even faster rate than the most successful console ever created, Sony's Playstation 2, despite still being sold out in most major markets.

This is the first time that a company has been market leader in the home console and the handheld market since 1994 when Nintendos Super NES and Gameboy dominated worldwide.

Vgchartz.com is proud to be first to announce this major sales cross over as an independent tracker of sales and expect this to be a milestone for the current generation. In just two years, home console sales for the three major manufacturers have effectively reversed. This will have a large impact on third party publishers and will undoubtedly influence the decisions they make in the future.

One factor that has no doubt helped Nintendo's Wii to gain so quickly is the console's broad appeal across all age groups, demographics and countries. Current sales are pretty evenly split between the three major markets 3.46 million have been sold in Japan, the American market (including Canada and South America) accounts for 4.24million and Other markets (including Europe and Australia and a few niche markets) for 2.87 million units sold, respectively.