Nintendo: Wii Looking To Keep Momentum

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Nintendo’s Wii console has been the darling of this video game generation, but can they keep it up? Nintendo of America’s president Reggie Fils-Aime made an appearance on financial network CNBC to promote the new Black Wiis and mentioned some important numbers as to how the Wii is doing.

The Nintendo Wii saw a double-digit sales growth for March 2010, after seeing sales declines in January and February. This February, they’ve sold 5,000,000 Wii units (presumably in the United States), which Reggie said was what Sony and Microsoft had sold, combined, in the last 12 months. That sounds a bit low to me, and Reggie doesn’t cite sources.

At that pace (through four months), Nintendo is on pace to sell a whopping 15 million Wiis this year – which would be quite the accomplishment. (Edit: See clarification below). Certainly, the new Black Wiis which were recently unleashed on America will provide a small sales boost. When asked by CNBC why they were coming out with a black model, Reggie said “to give customers a choice” as well as adding (and the real answer) that they’re trying to keep the Wii’s momentum going in sales with a new SKU that people will gobble up.

As for Netflix, the Wii was recently given the ability to stream online Netflix movies to their home consoles. Reggie said that “about a million” gamers had used the streaming Netflix feature since they unveiled it. Granted, it was just recently launched, but that number seems a bit small, specially when you consider there have been roughly, 53 million Wiis sold.

CNBC’s Maria Bartiromo asked him how Nintendo plans to continue selling luxury “want” products in the poor economy, and Reggie said that they do it by offering ‘quality’ software titles like Super Mario Galaxy 2 (which is set to be released later this month), and listed a few more first-party Nintendo titles coming soon.

EDIT: From Nintendo, regarding the 5 million number quoted by Reggie in the interview – “The sales figures referenced in the CNBC interview were not for the first four months of calendar year 2010, but rather the last four months of current publicly reported NPD data which runs December of 2009 through March of 2010.” That’s from Charlie Scibetta – Senior Director, Corporate Communications of Nintendo of America.