Wii sales hit 50 million worldwide
Nintendo console passes key milestone quicker than the PS2; storage solution unveiled
Nintendo president Satoru Iwata has announced that the company's Wii console has officially passed the 50 million mark, making it the fastest-selling console of all time.
Significantly it's reached that number quicker than the PlayStation 2, making the Wii the new benchmark console in home entertainment.
The sales numbers are partly thanks to the size of the videogames market in Europe and the US expanding rapidly, he said.
Iwata was talking in his keynote session at this year's GDC event in San Francisco, entitled "Discovering New Development Opportunities".
Also unveiled during the keynote was the long-awaited storage solution for the Wii, which will utilise high capacity SD cards capable of holding up to 240 titles, with Wii Shop content now downloadable direct to the SD card.
The session also saw Iwata reveal that the latest iteration of the DS console, the DSi, has now sold more than 2 million units since it launched in Japan last year.