Nintendo Wii Sales Second Best Since Launch

350,000, that's how many Wii's Nintendo sold last week, compared with 300,000 the week prior, and second only to an eight-day honeymoon period in late November 2006 after the system debuted and retailers moved more than 600,000 units. Remember when everyone shuffled nervously after Nintendo said they'd sell 14.5 million Wiis by fiscal year's end next March? Try up to 17.5 million, now, if they keep up this pace.

AP reports that Nintendo has ramped up production from 1.2 million units per month to 1.8 million, though it's still not enough to keep them on shelves. I'm sure plenty of stores even held systems in the back, the week going into Black Friday, just so they could more or less bolster their day's figures year-over-year with an instant guaranteed cashwrap-ringer.

One nitpick: Fils-Aime needs to tone down the hyperbole when he says stuff like "Consumers are buying every game we can put into the system." No Reggie, they're not, and you know they're not, and we don't need to talk about your system's staggering (yes, staggering) number of clunkers driven, in my opinion, by too many opportunistic bus-jumpers.

Yes, Super Mario Galaxy finally pushed Nintendo's weekly software sales slightly north of Microsoft's, but overall, Nintendo's a year from launch with a number that's almost exactly half Microsoft's current in total software sold. No indications the Wii's gaining, in other words.

Wii Sports is number one (or thereabouts) because you can't buy a Wii without it (and thus it ought to be delisted) and Super Mario Galaxy debuted only two weeks ago, so its numbers are predictably up there. Else it's down to Wii Play (a remarkable if creaky 41 weeks and going), Guitar Hero III (outsold by the PS2 and closely followed by the PS3 version) and Mario Party 8 staking out the top 25. Five for Nintendo, compared with nine for the Xbox 360.

With nothing else up anyone's sleeves now that Mass Effect and Mario are out, I'm sticking by my original prediction that Microsoft cleans up in software sales, followed by Nintendo, and trailed distantly by Sony's gradually accelerating PS3.

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