subject: History & Marketing Of The Nintendo Wii Gaming Console System [print this page] The Wii video game console released by Nintendo. As a seventh-generation console, the Wii primarily was to go against Microsoft's Xbox 360 and Sony's PlayStation 3. Nintendo states that its console targets a bigger range of people. As of December 31, 2008 the Wii sales overshot both the play station 3 and Xbox 360.
A great feature of the console is WiiConnect24, which enables it to receive messages and updates over the Internet.
The Wii is Nintendo's fifth console, it able to play all official Game Cube games. Nintendo first spoke of the console at E3 2004 and later unveiled the system at E3 2005.
The console was first known as "Revolution" until April 27, 2006, the Nintendo Style Guide refers to the console as "simply Wii, not Nintendo Wii", and making it the first home console Nintendo has marketed outside of Japan without the company name in its trademark. While "Wiis" is a commonly used as the name of the console, Nintendo has stated that the official way of saying it would be "Wii systems" or "Wii consoles. Since its launch, sales of the console have been higher than Xbox 360 and ps3. According to the NPD Group, the Wii sold more units in the United States than the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 combined in the first half of 2007. The sales are even larger in the Japanese market, Japan currently the highest sales. In Australia, the Wii blew away the record sells of Xbox 360 to make it the fastest selling games console in Australian history. Nintendo hopes to target a bigger range with console than that of others in the seventh generation. At a press talks for the upcoming Nintendo DS game Dragon Quest IX Satoru Iwata stated "We're not thinking about going into a battle with Sony, but about how many people we can get to play games. The thing we're thinking about most is not portable systems, consoles but rather how we can attract new people to play games."
