Wii

The Wii (/wiː/ WEE) is a home video game console released by Nintendo on November 19, 2006. It is Nintendo's fifth major home video game console, following the Nintendo GameCube, and is a seventh generation home console alongside Microsoft's Xbox 360 and Sony's PlayStation 3.

The GameCube had fallen behind in sales compared to previous console offerings from Microsoft and Sony. Around 2003, Nintendo president Satoru Iwata made the decision for the company's next console to focus less on computational and graphics power and instead reinventing the console's interface to target a broader demographic of players, using the codename Revolution for this new console as he believed it would spark a gaming revolution. With game designers Shigeru Miyamoto and Genyo Takeda taking the lead on the console's development, Nintendo created the Wii with its wireless Wii Remote controller that uses a combination of various motion sensing technologies and traditional controller features. The Wii Remote could be used as a pointing device or as a means to detect motion of the player's arm or body, creating new types of gameplay mechanics for the system. The Wii is also Nintendo's first home console to directly support Internet connectivity, and its system software provided a number of Wii Channels that used these new connectivity features to provide system and software updates, news channels, streaming media applications, and support for digital distribution of games including emulation of games from older consoles through the Virtual Console. These online features also allowed connectivity with the Nintendo DS for data sharing between supported games. The original Wii model also had direct support for GameCube games and hardware. Two additional Wii models were produced: RVL-101 which shared the same design as the original model but removed the GameCube compatibility features, and later, RVL-201 (Wii Mini) which was a redesigned budget model which further removed features including online connectivity and SD card storage.

Because of Nintendo's decision to focus less on computational power, the Wii and its games were less expensive than those of Microsoft and Sony. The Wii was extremely popular at launch, causing the system to be in short supply in some markets. The pack-in game, Wii Sports, was considered the killer app for the console, effectively demonstrating the effectiveness of the Wii Remote as a motion sensing game controller. Other milestone titles included Mario Kart Wii, New Super Mario Bros. Wii, Wii Play, Wii Fit, Super Smash Bros. Brawl, and Super Mario Galaxy, all which sold over 10 million copies. Within a year of launch, the Wii became the sales-leader against the other seventh-generation consoles, and by 2013, had surpassed over 100 million units sold. Total lifetime sales of the Wii had reached over 101 million units, trailing only being the original Playstation (102 million) and PlayStation 2 (155 million) consoles. The Wii repositioned Nintendo as a key player in the video game hardware marketplace; the introduction of the Wii Remote motion control led both Microsoft and Sony to develop their own competing products, the Kinect and PlayStation Move, respectively.

Nintendo had found that while the Wii had broadened the demographics that they wanted, the core gamer audience had shunned the Wii. The Wii's successor, the Wii U, was aimed to recapture this core gamer market with additional features atop the Wii. The Wii U was released in 2012, and Nintendo continued to sell both units through the following year. The Wii was formally discontinued in October 2013, though Nintendo continued to produce and market the Wii Mini through 2017, and offered a subset of the Wii's online services through 2019.