Nintendo Wii sales drop 21%

Wii sales are down year on year
Wii sales are down year on year

Nintendo's honeymoon with the Wii is well and truly over with the company announcing this week that sales of the console are down 21 per cent year on year.

This is not to say that the Wii isn't selling – Nintendo sold 25.95 million Wiis between April 2008 to March 2009 – it's just not the runaway success it once was for the company.

Software slump

Nintendo's overall profits took a bit of a hit as well, with full-year figures showing that they are down 18 per cent year on year.

This is echoed on the software side, with Wii game sales down 6 per cent and DS game sales down 23 per cent.

The software slump is being blamed for the lack of strong titles in the second half of the year.

If 2010's efforts are anything to go by, however, software sales could well increase, given that Edge magazine gave Super Mario Galaxy 2, which is out on the Wii 11 June, a whopping 10 out of 10.

Surprisingly sales of Nintendo's handheld, the DS, were only down 12 per cent. This is pretty impressive considering it has been around for over five years now.

While most companies would be panicking at the sudden drop in income, Nintendo is still staying upbeat, noting that these results are the company's third best ever.

Via Kotaku

Marc Chacksfield

Marc Chacksfield is the Editor In Chief, Shortlist.com at DC Thomson. He started out life as a movie writer for numerous (now defunct) magazines and soon found himself online - editing a gaggle of gadget sites, including TechRadar, Digital Camera World and Tom's Guide UK. At Shortlist you'll find him mostly writing about movies and tech, so no change there then.