Wii, 3DS Sales Dive

Mario may be flying off the shelves, but the 3DS and the Wii aren't.

Looks like Nintendo's got an even worse problem than they thought. Both Wii and 3DS sales have really tanked in April. How bad were the numbers? In April, Wii sales were 172,000 units, which was down 38% from last year and down 40% from March. Ah, you say, desperately seeking an excuse for the big N... maybe all console sales were bad in April? Nope. The Xbox 360 saw sales jump 60% over last April, to 297,000 units, and even the PS3 was up 13% to 204,000 units, despite a wave of bad PR from the PSN debacle.

The Wii is now safely ensconced in 3rd place, and unless Sony tries even harder to sully the PlayStation brand, that probably won't change. Looks like it's well past the time for a new console introduction... maybe Nintendo will want to speed things up a little and launch it by this holiday season.

Perhaps the 3DS will save Nintendo's profits and sales while the Wii sinks into oblivion? Not with a performance like April, with only 194,000 units sold in the month. That's less than half of what the 3DS sold in its launch week in March... about as grim a drop-off as you could imagine. Well, that was the US... maybe in Japan the 3DS is doing better? Hey, what about sales during the first week of May in Japan? That's Golden Week, a big holiday in Japan and usually good for some nice game sales.

Sorry to disappoint you, but 3DS sales were flat during Golden Week, selling just over 29,000 units. Meanwhile, the PSP sold nearly twice as many units as the 3DS, almost 55,000.

Nintendo' sgoing to have to pull some rabbits out of its hat at E3 to keep the rest of this year from being pretty dreadful. Wii at $99 by Christmas?