The Wii launched this past Sunday in the United States and Canada and Reggie Fils-Aime, president of Nintendo North America, has stated that he is expecting to sell 1 million units in America and two million worldwide by the mid-January. Nintendo predicts it will ship about 4 million Wiis globally before the end of this year.
Fils-Aime stated, "Our focus truly is on growing the industry — getting more women to play, getting older consumers to play. To do that we needed to have the remote be easy…and second we needed to have the games,” in an interview given to Reuters just days before launch.
Wii is presently the least expensive next gen game console on the market. Fils-Aime thinks that the game industry, as a whole, has lost touch with the gaming community and has failed to understand the needs and wants of gamers. Nintendo wanted to change this paradigm and go against the tide. "We think that’s in part why the industry has become so insular — very expensive machines, machines that arguably do more than you need them to do… We wanted to bring it back to a core gaming machine."
Fils-Aime continued, "We designed it from the get-go to be profitable, so it will be past this weekend and throughout its entire life… Because we’re a gaming company, we have to be profitable in the gaming business. It’s not like our competitors who can make profit in operating systems or TVs to offset their losses on the gaming side."
