The Wii is Nintendo’s fifth major home video game console, following the Nintendo GameCube. It is a seventh generation home console alongside Microsoft’s Xbox 360 and Sony’s PlayStation 3. The Wii repositioned Nintendo as a key player in the video game hardware marketplace.
About Wii in brief
The Wii is Nintendo’s fifth major home video game console, following the Nintendo GameCube. It is a seventh generation home console alongside Microsoft’s Xbox 360 and Sony’s PlayStation 3. Nintendo created the Wii with its wireless Wii Remote controller that uses a combination of various motion sensing technologies and traditional controller features. The Wii was extremely popular at launch, causing the system to be in short supply in some markets. Within a year of launch, the Wii became the sales-leader against the other seventh-generation consoles, and by 2013, had surpassed over 100 million units sold. Total lifetime sales of the Wii had reached over 101 million units, trailing only behind the original PlayStation, the PlayStation 4, and the PlayStation 2 consoles. Two additional Wii models were produced: a revised model that shared the same design as the original Wii but removed the GameCube compatibility features, and the Wii Mini that was a compact, budget redesign. Nintendo continued to sell both units through the following year, but the Wii was formally discontinued in October 2013, thoughNintendo continued to produce and market the WiiMini through 2017, and offered a subset of Wii’s online services through 2019. The Wii repositioned Nintendo as a key player in the video game hardware marketplace. It led both Microsoft and Sony to develop their own competing products, the Kinect and PlayStation Move, respectively. It also led Nintendo to pursue gaming hardware and software that would appeal to all ages and all ages. It was also Nintendo’s first home console to directly support Internet connectivity, and its system software provided a number of Wii Channels that used these new connectivity features to provide system and software updates, news channels, streaming media applications, and support for digital distribution of games including emulation of games from older consoles through the Virtual Console.
The pack-in game, Wii Sports, was considered the killer app for the console. Other milestone titles included Mario Kart Wii, New Super Mario Bros. Wii, Wii Play, Wii Fit, Super Smash Bros. Brawl, and Super Mario Galaxy, all which sold over 10 million copies. Nintendo had found that while the WiiHad broadened the demographics that they wanted, the core gamer audience had shunned the Wii. Nintendo found that the Wii U, was aimed to recapture this core gamer market with additional features atop the Wii, and was released in 2012. Over the next two years, PlayStation sales languished behind its next-generation competitors, Sony’s Xbox 2 and Microsoft’s PlayStation 2 and Xbox 360. Nintendo’s president Satoru Iwata made the decision for the company’s next console to focus less on computational and graphics power and instead reinventing the console’s interface to target a broader demographic of players, using the codename Revolution for this new console as he believed it would spark a gaming revolution. The company had seen what games like Dance Dance Revolution had done with unique controller approaches, according to Miyomoto. Nintendo began working with Gyration Inc. to prototype future controllers using their licensed patents related to motion detection technologies.
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This page is based on the article Wii published in Wikipedia (as of Dec. 07, 2020) and was automatically summarized using artificial intelligence.
