Nintendo's initial Wii holiday stats prove that down is the new up |
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Nintendo's initial Wii holiday stats prove that down is the new up
Nintendo sold more than 550,000 of its Wii game consoles in the U.S. during the Thanksgiving week, according to internal tracking data disclosed by the company this afternoon. Redmond-based Nintendo of America says in a news release that the result shows consumers are responding favorably to the Wii's new $200 price.
What the news release doesn't mention is that the company last year said it sold 800,000 Wiis in the U.S. during Thanksgiving week. Of course, console sales on the whole are down this year, thanks to the difficult economy. The real test will be how sales of Microsoft's Xbox 360 and Sony's PlayStation 3 compare with Nintendo's result.
In the meantime, Nintendo's stats show how rough things have gotten.
Then again, it could have been worse for Nintendo if not for that $50 price cut. Cammie Dunaway, Nintendo of America executive vice president, tells the San Francisco Chronicle that sales are up 85 percent compared with previous weeks since the company reduced the price in September.
And not all of the numbers are down compared with past years. Nintendo notes that it sold more than 1 million Nintendo DS and Nintendo DSi systems in the U.S. for the week, which the company says surpassed a Thanksgiving week record for handheld gaming system sales, set by the Game Boy Advance in 2002.
Update: Microsoft doesn't disclose its internal numbers, but Xbox 360 unit sales for the holiday week were more than two times higher than the previous week, representing the biggest week of the year for the console in the U.S., spokesman David Dennis said via phone. The bigger questions are how the numbers compare to the same week last year, and to Nintendo's sales, but it looks like we'll have to wait for the monthly report from the NPD Group market research to get a sense for those details.
We also have a message in to a Sony representative, and we'll update this post depending on the response from the company.
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