Nintendo Targets 35 Million Wii Console Sales in U.S. (Update3)
Nintendo Co., the world's largest maker of handheld game players, expects to sell as many as 35 million Wii consoles in the U.S. and approach the record 38.2 million PlayStation 2s sold by Sony Corp. Shares of Nintendo rose.
Context & Ripple Effects
Nintendo set the U.S. ambition just six months after the November 2006 launch, when it allocated 400,000 units for Japan alone and supply was the binding constraint. The new 35 million U.S. target is a statement about manufacturing scale as much as demand: it puts the Wii within reach of Sony's 38.2 million PlayStation 2 record, the benchmark for console penetration.
The framing matters because Sony's own next-generation rollout was struggling at the time — CNET's syndicated take on the same day ran under a headline asking whether the U.S. would even get an 80GB PlayStation 3, keeping Sony's pricing and configuration questions in the same news cycle as Nintendo's bullish forecast. Investors read the target as credible enough to bid Nintendo shares up on the announcement.
First-order effects
- Nintendo must sustain a production ramp well beyond its launch-era allocation rates to make 35 million U.S. units plausible, making component supply and factory throughput the company's immediate operational challenge.
- Sony faces direct pressure on its home-turf record: the PlayStation 2's 38.2 million U.S. mark is now an explicit target for a rival console still in its first year.
Second-order effects
- Third-party publishers watching the install-base gap have an incentive to shift development resources and exclusive content toward the Wii, compounding Nintendo's momentum at Sony's and Microsoft's expense.
- Sony and Microsoft are pushed toward price cuts and bundle strategies to defend share against a competitor winning on reach rather than raw hardware power.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, console competition re-centers on installed base and audience breadth rather than specification leadership, weakening the assumption that the most powerful machine wins a cycle.
- A Wii at PlayStation 2 scale would entrench Nintendo's position as gatekeeper of a mass-market gaming audience, raising the strategic cost for any publisher that sits out the platform.
The trend: The console market is entering a cycle where installed-base scale and audience expansion, not hardware specifications, determine platform leadership.