Wii Sports sells 45 million copies

Dethrones Mario Bros as biggest ever.

Image credit: Eurogamer

News by Robert Purchese Associate Editor

Updated on May 11, 2009

Nintendo has revealed that Wii Sports has sold an outrageous 45.7m copies, making it the biggest-selling videogame ever, according to Wikipedia. Only Super Mario Bros. comes close with 40.23m sales.

But sales at the peak of the all-time charts are distorted, as each of the biggest games has come bundled with hardware. Wii Sports is packed with Wii, Super Mario Bros. was packed with NES, Tetris (33m) was packed with GameBoy and Super Mario World (20m) was packed with SNES.

Similarly, Wii Play's enormous 22.9m sales can be attributed to people wanting another Wii controller. You may even say 18.2m people were after a Wii Fit balance board, or that 15.4m people wanted a Mario Kart Wii steering wheel. You might say that because you've seen the next-best Wii seller only posting half as many sales.

But Nintendogs manages a beastly 22.2m without all that, and New Super Mario Bros. isn't far behind with 18.6m.

Brain Training notches up 17.4m sales just ahead of Pokémon Diamond/Pearl with 16.8m sales. Also close are Mario Kart DS with 14.6m sales and More Brain Training with 13.7m sales. After that, the list starts to drop off a bit.

Every single top 10 entry in Wikipedia's best-selling videogames of all time is by Nintendo. No wonder the house of Mario made a staggering USD 2.8bn net profit for the financial year ending 31st March.

Update: Cooking Guide has sold 1.8m not 18.6m copies. Sorry, we were dazzled.

Wii