Thanks to the success of games such as Wii Fit, EA Sports Activeand Jillian Michaels’ Fitness Ultimatum 2009, the medical community is starting to take games seriously as a means to pump you up keep us healthy. Reuters reports that at this year’s fifth annual Games for Health Conference in Boston, a bolstered attendance brought health experts together to talk about these games, and you’d be surprised how much money these titles generated last year.
“Healthcare is 18 percent of the GDP of the United States and so games for health is probably the largest sector of activity in the serious games field long-term,” said Ben Sawyer, a co-founder of The Games for Health Project. He added, “If you add up the 18 month sales of Wii Fit and the sales of EA Sports Active, Konami’s Dance Dance Revolution and other healthy games, the worldwide retail numbers are over $2 billion.” That’s not a bad slice of the $22 billion pie that gaming lovingly prepared last year, if we may say so.
Some experts think the government should look into offering these types of games in schools to help kids learn the importance of exercise, while others think that a public service campaign should be started and backed by the president, Congress, and other federal agencies. We’d comment, but we really only play Wii Fit for the hulahoop game.
From the folks that brought you … erm … a bunch of case mods for the Xbox 360, comes the “Wii Riiser Aerobic Step” for your Wii Fit Balance Board. Just in case you were unsatisfied with the heights that the existing step peripheral offered, Zoozen has gone out and created an attachment to boost the level up to a more challenging four inches.
The company contests this is the average height of an actual stepper (which we won’t point out also costs significantly less than the Wii Fit and “Wii Riiser Aerobic Step” combined), and as such, will help “improve your step aerobic workout.” While we’re sure this peripheral would attach to your Balance Board that much easier than two pieces of equally sized wood, we’re not so sure it would serve a different purpose. Zoozen’s “Wii Riiser Aerobic Step” is available now for the not-so-nice price of $39.99.
A GoNintendo reader by the name of Maxemillian_X recently snapped a picture of an upcoming release list from an Amsterdam-based gaming retailer which reveals two interesting pieces of Wii news. The first (and somewhat more reasonable) item is a supposed July 10 release date for the Wii Sports Resortand Wii MotionPlus bundle, as well as the standalone MotionPlus peripheral.
The second eye catching release date on the list is for Wii Fit Plus, which is apparently due out November 19, giving us plenty of time to find out what the hell it is. Given the pictured release list’s dubious origins (we don’t know what store it came from), we’re taking it with a healthy dose of trepidation. Still, a summer release for Wii Sports Resort and a follow up to Nintendo’s exergaming cash cow don’t seem beyond the realm of possibilities.
It’s not surprising to see that hardware sales rose significantly in December, but what is surprising is the comparatively small progress made by the Wii — only a 5% increase from November, compared to some big gains for the competition. People who are paid a lot more than us predicted the Wii would smash the 3 million sales barrier, but nope. We’re putting this down to a lack of holiday season supply, or November’s figures simply being amazing.
On the other hand, selling 2.15 million of anything in a single month isn’t too shabby!
December’s best-selling games are past the fold, along with 2008’s top sellers. Spoiler: Nintendo software kicked ass. Top 10 games of December 2008
1. Wii Play — Wii — Nintendo — 1.46 million 2. Call of Duty: World at War — Xbox 360 — Activision — 1.33 million* 3. Wii Fit – Wii — Nintendo — 999K 4. Mario Kart Wii — Wii — Nintendo — 979K 5. Guitar Hero: World Tour — Wii — Activision — 850K* 6. Gears of War 2 — Xbox 360 — Microsoft — 745K* 7. Left 4 Dead — Xbox 360 — Electronic Arts — 629K 8. Mario Kart — DS — Nintendo — 540K 9. Call of Duty: World at War — PS3 — Activision — 533K 10. Animal Crossing: City Folk — Wii — Nintendo — 497K*
Top 10 games of 2008
1. Wii Play — Wii — Nintendo — 5.28 million 2. Mario Kart Wii — Wii — Nintendo — 5.00 million 3. Wii Fit — Wii — Nintendo — 4.53 million 4. Super Smash Bros. Brawl — Wii — Nintendo — 4.17 million 5. Grand Theft Auto IV — Xbox 360 — Take–Two — 3.29 million* 6. Call of Duty: World at War — Xbox 360 — Activision — 2.75 million* 7. Gears of War 2 — Xbox 360 — Microsoft — 2.31 million* 8. Grand Theft Auto IV — PS3 — Take–Two — 1.89 million* 9. Madden NFL ‘09 — Xbox 360 — Electronic Arts — 1.87 million* 10. Mario Kart — DS — Nintendo — 1.65 million
* Includes collector’s, limited, and bundled editions.
Despite some saying that Wii Fit is only gathering dust in the closet, UK amputees are using the software and bundled Balance Board to help them with their treatment. This isn’t the first we’ve heard about a Nintendo product helping folks out with their physical therapy, but this is definitely one of the most interesting. Rather than just getting people to be more active by playing Wii Sports or something, the Balance Board and Wii Fit software are helping people adapt to their new prosthetic limbs. From walking to simply leaning, it’s helping them adapt to their new, albeit very unfortunate, way of life.
If you’re on the hunt for a Wii this holiday season, then Walmart.com just might have you covered. The retail giant will supposedly be selling “tens of thousands” of Wiis starting now. If you’re looking for just the console, or a bundle package, Walmart will have several different options available to consumers, starting with the console alone ($250) on up to a bundle package featuring Wii Fit ($460). Of course, now that the word is out, there might not be much time for you to nab one of your own. So we suggest you get to it.
Gamasutra has compiled a bunch of charts showing the best-selling games of 2008 (so far) across all formats. At first glance, the results are thoroughly predictable — it’s yet more Wii dominance in the U.S. — but there are interesting factoids to be drawn from this.
Wii Play, for example, looks like finishing in the top five games of the year for the second year running. Even more impressively, Gamasutra thinks it could sell more copies in 2008 than in 2007, which is all kinds of crazy. Surely that would be some kind of first?
The top two spots are held by Super Smash Bros. Brawl and Mario Kart Wii, a pair of titles that we always expected to sell well, but to beat the likes of Wii Fit or other games aimed at Nintendo’s broadened audience? Speaking of Wii Fit, it tops the chart for estimated revenue so far this year, thanks to its higher retail price. We’ll reproduce the 2008 YTD sales table below, but Gamasutra has other data worth looking at here.
Analysts think that due to the continuing decline of the U.S. dollar and the 13-year high for the Japanese Yen, you won’t be seeing too many hot deals on Nintendo’s Wii this holiday season. With the Yen being so high, it drives up the cost of Japanese goods for U.S. retailers. And, seeing as how the U.S. economy has been in such bad shape all year, merchants have discounted their goods to offset that fall to a point where they can’t afford to lower prices to attract customers any more.
Wii Fit, one of the items analysts see as being a must-have this season, could be most affected. With the profit margin on it so small (same goes for the Wii console itself), retailers can’t afford to cut prices. One positive thing to come out of this, however, is that the Euro has been on a decline, as well. This means that Nintendo should be shipping more to the U.S., whereas in the past, Nintendo focused on Europe first.
If you remember their last video, these two chaps from the German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence Center demonstrated a hack for the Balance Board enabling them to travel through Google Earth and Second Life with the peripheral. In this video, the two have modified the board to control movement in another virtual world — World of Warcraft.
The Warcraft portion doesn’t appear until the 44-second mark, and you can’t really do much with the Balance Board save walk around, so don’t expect to take down any high-level elite mobs or lead a raid with the hack. But it’s still cool to see non-traditional uses for the expensive peripheral! For more Balance Board mods, stay tune for our own Mike Sylvester’s Wii Racing Experiment!
Reader Shawn, hailing from sunny and fabulous State College, PA (hey, we’re practically neighbors!), wrote in to inform us that his local Circuit City had restocked Wii consoles and Wii Fit bundles. He received an email from the retail giant (he’s likely signed up for some waiting list thing) and headed on down to his store to check. Sure enough, he found both in stock and ready to be liberated from the confines of the dusty retail shelf it sat upon.
We did our own fact-checking, calling up the local Circuit City in our own town, as well as checked their site online. Online, we had no luck, but the young lady that answered the phone at our local Circuit City store said that they did indeed have consoles in stock, but they were holding them until Sunday. Then, they plan to hand out vouchers and sell the consoles like it was launch day. When asked about Wii Fit, she assumed the store would do the same thing, but had no official word to give.
So, for those of you still in the market for either a console or Wii Fit, we’d suggest calling up your local retailers (it might be other retailers than just Circuit City) to see what the deal is. Because this isn’t something confirmed by corporate (or a Sunday circular scan), we’re going to keep it in the rumor pile.
Health games big business, experts push for exergaming in schools originally appeared on Joystiq on Fri, 26 Jun 2009 03:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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