DS and Wii continue sales blitz in Australia

To say that that Nintendo has done well down under when it comes to the DS and Wii would be quite an understatement, considering that both devices have been breaking sales records in Australia. The Wii, for instance, was the fastest console to reach 500,000 units sold in Australia, whereas the DS was the top-selling games device in 2007. It looks like Nintendo's strong results have continued unabated, given that newly released figures show that the DS has now reached more than 1.5 million units sold, and the Wii now has 750,000.

The DS reached its milestone in 194 weeks, whereas the Wii took 102 weeks. Both devices broke the record for fastest-selling console to reach 1.5 million and 750,000 units sold, respectively. The previous holder of both these records was Sony's PlayStation 2. A spokesman from industry data tracker GfK Australia told GameSpot AU that the PS2 took "over 200 weeks to break 1.5 million units sold, and 136 weeks to meet the 750,000 mark." Although the spokesman was certain that other consoles before the PS2 had sold more than 1.5 million units, he was unable to confirm which ones because GfK Australia only started tracking console data in 2000. Currently, the PS2 has a total install base in Australia of 2.4 million consoles.

Unlike the weekly software-sales data that GfK Australia puts out, these hardware numbers include figures from one of the nation's leading video game retailers, EB Games Australia.

The week of November 10-16 proved to be a particularly good week for Nintendo, with the Wii selling more than 35,000 units around Australia. That week also treated Wii Music well, considering that it sold more than 28,000 copies and beat Activision's Guitar Hero World Tour in the overall top 10 chart.

At the time of publication, both Sony and Microsoft were unable to provide recent sales figures for the PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 to GameSpot AU for comparison.