GDC09: Nintendo has shipped 50 million Wii consoles

Satoru Iwata's GDC keynote has revealed a somewhat unsurprising fact about the Wii. Iwata explained that global shipments for the Wii have reached "more than 50 million," propelling it to be "the fastest selling video game hardware in history." Let's look at some recent numbers, shall we?

As many of you NPD followers know, the Wii sold a whopping 753,000 units in February, and 679,000 in January, making for a total of 1,432,000 consoles sold in North America so far this year. In Japan, the console has sold 354,367 units so far in 2009 (counting the last few days of December), and Nintendo revealed 45 million Wiis had been shipped worldwide back in January. Add AMD's 50 millionth GPU, and you can see where this is going. We fully expect Nintendo's next move will be to purchase Japan and rename it Kirbyland.