Wii, DS: still crazy (popular) after all these years If a lack of games is dampening consumer interest in Nintendo's market-leading Wii and DS consoles, you wouldn't have known it from this year's Thanksgiving sale offers. Widespread Black Friday discounts on the machines brought an early Christmas present for Nintendo, according to its internal
estimates.
DS sales -- buoyed by discounts, bundle deals, and the release of new
hardware colors -- totalled 900,000 over Thanksgiving week, a number
significantly in excess of the half-million or so units Nintendo could
reasonably expect to sell over a normal month. The Wii did almost as
well, "only" selling 600,000 or so systems, again easily more than the
system's normal monthly tally.
Nintendo's U.S. president Reggie Fils-Aime seemed quite pleased.
"U.S. shoppers bought about 9,000 Nintendo hardware systems nonstop for every
hour of every day during the week of Black Friday," he said in a press
release. "For the past several years, consumers have decided that
Nintendo defined both top value and all-inclusive entertainment, and
that sentiment continues again at the start of this shopping season."
No word yet on how Fils-Aime's competition performed last week, but we're
guessing if they had figures that impressive to trumpet, they'd be doing
it by now.
