It’s been a little over four months since I declared that the Nintendo Wii will be the best selling console of the next five years. It was, at the time, still sort of an auspicious thing to say, because conventional wisdom was that it was too early to declare a winner. Six months in, people said, the console war had barely even begun.

It was a bullshit argument, of course.

When you’re talking about products and consumers there’s really no such thing as a ‘comeback.’ It’s not like a boxing match. There’s no underdog, getting knocked down in the first round but then punching his way back to victory in the eighth. That doesn’t happen. The reality is that when two similar products hit the market at around the same time, the market chooses the one they like best. That choice is almost always unchanging, especially as word-of-mouth and mindshare spreads.

The only thing that can disrupt that is either a truly market-disrupting piece of software (i.e. a game or an app that people will need to have, but which essentially comes out of nowhere) or a new iteration in the product line that gives the original product a significant aesthetic or performance boost.

Neither Sony or Microsoft have anything on that level planned. Their respective software lines are sequel-heavy in both cases. Microsoft is still leaning way too heavily on genres and gameplay styles that appeal to PC gamers, who are only marginally important when it comes to moving hardware (most of the people who would buy an Xbox 360 for, say, Bioshock, already own an Xbox 360) and Sony is still treading water as people try to figure out their beast of a console.

I could still be surprised. I could be proven wrong. I’m open to that. But look at what’s happened since I wrote that article in May. Nintendo:

• Outsold both Sony and Microsoft’s consoles worldwide every month
• Outsold both Sony and Microsoft’s consoles in all major territories (US, Europe and Japan) every month
• Become the worldwide sales leader by most accounts, despite Microsoft having an extra year on the market with their console
• Continued to have trouble keeping their stock of consoles on the shelf.

People can still find things to quibble about, I suppose. They’ll compare this generation to the SNES/Genesis generation, where the SNES “came from behind” and won in the end. Or point out that Nintendo hardware sales are down in Japan the past couple of weeks. But, really, they’re missing the larger point: hardware-wise, it’s over. Nintendo has launched a product more successful than Sony and Microsoft.

With that in mind, the August NPD hardware numbers are just so boring:

Wii: 403,600
DS: 383,300
360: 276,700
PS2: 202,000
PSP: 151,200
PS3: 130,600

More interesting, however, is the software side of things:

01. Madden NFL 08 (Xbox 360) – 896.6K
02. Madden NFL 08 (PS2) – 643.6K
03. BioShock (Xbox 360) – 490.9K
04. Madden NFL 08 (PS3) – 336.2K
05. Wii Play/ w remote (Wii) – 256.8K
06. Metroid Prime 3: Corruption (Wii) – 218.1K
07. Mario Strikers Charged (Wii) – 147.4K
08. Guitar Hero 2 w/guitar (PS2) – 145.4K
09. Mario Party 8 (Wii) – 138.3K
10. Guitar Hero Encore: Rocks the 80s (PS2) – 127.1K
11. Madden NFL 08 (Xbox)
12. Madden NFL 08 (Wii)
13. Brain Age 2: More Training in Minutes a Day (DS)
14. Two Worlds (Xbox 360)
15. Pokémon Diamond (DS)
16. High School Musical: Making the Cut (DS)
17. Guitar Hero 2 w/guitar (360)
18. Madden NFL 08 (PSP)
19. Pokémon Pearl (DS)
20. Tiger Woods PGA Tour 08 (Xbox 360)

When this was released, a lot of people were disappointed by the poor showing of Madden for the Wii. Hell, it was outsold by the damned Xbox version. And that’s not the Xbox 360 — that’s the old, black, so-huge Xbox. The Wii’s hardware numbers for August were, by all accounts, insane, and yet they sold probably just around 100,000 copies of the software title that typically drives hardware sales in August. How could something like that happen?

There’s a realization here. All that stuff about seniors buying Wii consoles and couples buying Wii consoles and just in general supposed ‘non-gamers’ buying Wii consoles? It must be true. Hundreds of thousands of them, apparently, bought a Wii console in August, and breezed right past Madden — because it’s one of those old kinds of games that’s too complicated and not fun — but made sure to grab Mario Party and Wii Play.

It’s surprising not because I believed all those stories about the Wii bringing in ‘new gamers’ weren’t true, but because I had no idea they were driving Wii sales to such a massive degree. These so-called ‘non-gamers’ aren’t just a small new pocket of people dipping their toes into the video game world, they’re a large pack of people, eschewing the old in favour of the new. And I don’t think they’re going to stop.

Maybe Nintendo should have stuck with the “Revolution” name after all.

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