Nintendo President: Most Wii games are not profitable

As the fastest-selling game console ever, the Wii is considered one of the main reasons the game industry is still thriving during the economic downturn. So it might come as a surprise to find out that only a precious few of its games are actually profitable.

A Profitable Platform For Unprofitable Games?

That bomb dropped from the mouth of none other than Reggie Fils-Aime, president of Nintendo of America. A New York Times article examining the game industry's current sales model quotes Fils-Aime as saying that "publishers of games for its Wii console needed to sell one million units of a game to turn a profit."

The piece goes on to point out that according to NPD figures, only 16 of the 486 games currently available for Nintendo's flagship console have surpassed the one million unit mark. That's a dismal 3%. And of those 16, nine are made in-house by Nintendo. Third-party companies, sucks to be you.

Fils-Aime's comment should be taken more as a generalization than a rule, however, as many companies have still found a way to be profitable on the system without moving millions of games. Once-embattled publisher Majesco, for instance, has enjoyed a financial resurgence due in part to success with Wii games like Jillian Michael's Fitness Ultimatum, an exercise game that has sold about 500,000 copies -- no paltry number, but certainly fewer than Fils-Aime's magic million.

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