Nintendo President Satoru Iwata said Wii sales could top the 118 million sales of the PlayStation 2. In an interview with he talks about the $100 PS3 price cut and the slimmer PSP not being a threat to Nintendo’s business. To quote him: “I wouldn’t say there is no overlap between the group of customers Sony is targeting and the group of users that Nintendo is targeting. But that overlap is quite small.”
The Wii has outsold the PS3 and Xbox 360 consoles since its launch in November 2006, thanks to it’s low $250 price and motion sensor controller. But “Sony’s PS2 sales of 100 million units is an extraordinary number that our home game console business has not achieved,” Iwata said. “But if we can make our bid to expand the gaming population a continued success, we could exceed that,” he told Reuters.
Sony has shipped more than 120 million units of the PS2, helping the Tokyo-based electronics and entertainment conglomerate dominate the $30 billion global video game industry over the past decade.
Nintendo’s strategy to entice new players into the video game market has so far proved a smashing success: its DS portable and the Wii console are flying off store shelves. Nintendo expects to have sold 19.8 million Wii consoles by March 2008.