Wii Sports Resort Sells 500,000 Copies

Nintendo's successor to its king of casual games has made a strong debut, selling 500,000 copies in less than two weeks, Nintendo announced.

Sales lightning does strike twice for Wii Sports. The first game earned a spot as the best selling game of all time (a feat no doubt accomplished with the help of being packaged with every Wii console) and though only time will tell if its sequel, Wii Sports Resort, will do as well in the long run, it's certainly off to a good start. The game has sold 500,000 copies in the eight days since its release, according to Nintendo.

"Through Monday we sold one copy of Wii Sports Resort roughly every 1.5 seconds continuously since it launched in the United States," Cammie Dunaway of Nintendo said. "This tells us consumers were eagerly waiting to get their hands on these fun activities, and it's a great start for a game that will have long-lasting appeal."

Nintendo boasts that their accomplishment amounts to the providing of "staycations to thousands of people nationwide," which is a pretty lame way of putting it. More significant, I'd say, is that this means that some 500,000 people out there right now have Wii Motion Plus peripherals (bundled in with the game) in their homes, effectively creating for Nintendo a userbase for the peripheral without requiring them to sell or market it on its own.