Over 600,000 Wiis sold so far

While Sony said it would have 400,000 PlayStation 3 systems ready for its North American launch, Nintendo consistently refused to put a comparable figure on its own efforts with the Wii launch. Instead it would say only that it would ship 4 million systems worldwide by the end of the year.

Now that the launch has come and gone, Nintendo has finally tallied up the number of Wiis it has sold. Today the company said that more than 600,000 Wiis were sold in the Americas in the console's first eight days of release.

"We've shipped retailers several times the amount of hardware the other company was able to deliver for its launch around the same time -- and we still sold out," Nintendo of America president Reggie Fils-Aime said in a statement. Leading up to the PS3 launch, one analyst predicted that Sony would fall well short of its shipment goal, suggesting that fewer than 200,000 PS3s would be available on day one.

First-party software and accessory sales brought in more than $190m on their own. The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess in particular rang up strong sales of more than 454,000, or three games for every four consoles. Nintendo said the system's downloadable game service, the Virtual Console, was also a hit, though it gave no figures to describe how big a hit it was.

The Wii will be released in the UK on 8 December.