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 Microsoft’s 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 Nintendo’s 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.


Notes:

(*)Vgchartz.com tracks consoles sold to consumers and not to retailers and other outlets. While Microsoft’s Xbox 360 lifetime shipments may be slightly higher than the shipments of Nintendo’s Wii, more Wii consoles made it from retailer to consumers than Xbox 360´s, due to the fact that Wii remains in a state of shortage in most regions around the world and units are sold just shortly after they become available to consumers. This furthermore explains why numbers on the front page of VGchartz.com are always a bit lower than the numbers given by the manufacturers themselves: To Sony, Microsoft and Nintendo every console that made it to retailers is “sold”. In reality these consoles may be lying in retailer warehouses and outlets for weeks until they are sold to consumers.

(**)Vgchartz.com projections are based on sampled retailer data from all over the world. Vgchartz.com collects data from a carefully selected group of retailers and determines projected sales figures for entire regions with knowledge of market size, retailer market shares, retailer bias and so forth - the same methods used by larger and more established sales tracking firms. To learn more about VGchartz´ methodology of tracking sales data, contact us ([email protected]) or visit our website to find out more.

News from VGChartz

Also, the more a console sells the more games get developed for it, take a look at PS2 and the 360. The so called "wii has no games" is shortly going to end in a months time, well more near the holiday season too!
Great things to come in 2008!