Wii has been a real hit for Nintendo. The console has been sold out as soon as it arrives in stores and now VGCharts reports that Nintendo has sold 5 million Wii consoles. These are pretty evenly distributed over the globe, with a small dominance in North America. How many it would have been able to sell if it had more consoles to ship is an interesting thought. GameDaily also reports that Wii (436,000) sold 50% better than Xbox 360 (294,000) and almost twice as much as PlayStation 3 (244,000) in North America during January, which were both outsold by PlayStation 2 (299,000). Microsoft has reported being very happy with the results and we can only guess that Nintendo is too.
An interesting side note is that a clear majority of the people buying Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 are buying the more expensive version and not the stripped down versions. The consumers seems to be realizing the extra value of Xbox 360 Premium and PlayStation 3 60GB.
Earlier in February The Academy of Interactive Arts & Sciences honored Nintendo with three awards (Outstanding Innovation in Gaming, Outstanding Achievement: Game Play Engineering, Outstanding Achievement: Game Design) for Wii Sports and one (Story and Character Development) for The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess. From a game perspective the big winner was Gears of War with 8 awards (counting both console and PC categories).
