Nintendo, one of the world’s leading video game specialists, said that it had sold-in about 34.55 million Nintendo Wii game consoles. Since the number easily surpasses the amount of Microsoft Xbox 360 and Sony PlayStation 3 sold, the Wii becomes the best-selling new-generation video game console.

According to Nintendo’s financial report, by the 30^th of September, 2008, the company has sold-in 34.55 million Wii devices worldwide. Microsoft recently said that it had sold-in over 24 million Xbox 360 consoles, whereas Sony is estimated to have shipped about 16 – 17 million PlayStation 3 machines.

The reason of Wii’s popularity is ease-of-use and simplistic games that are appealing for casual gamers. Nevertheless, so-called hardcore gamers also purchase Wii as well as games for the device. Meanwhile, both PS3 and X360 target experience gamers and are unlikely to attract a lot of novices.

Nintendo Wii features IBM’s custom PowerPC architecture-based microprocessor named Broadway clocked at 729MHz and code-named Hollywood chip with built-in graphics core, DSP and I/O features from ATI that operates at 243MHz, earlier reports suggested. Nintendo Wii uses 91MB of memory in total: 23MB of “main” 1T-SRAM, 64MB of “external” 1T-SRAM and 3MB texture buffer on the GPU. Nintendo’s Wii does not feature a hard disk drive, instead, it boasts with 512MB of flash memory, but the console will also have a card reader, which will allow installing more memory.

Nintendo set the recommended retail price of ¥25 000 in Japan, $249 in the U.S. and €249 in Europe.

Tags: Nintendo, Wii