…and about 1,000 AA batteries. Yuk yuk.
More seriously, Next Generation has a handy pie chart up today showing how said owners have purchased their Wiimotes. This is good information to have — especially if you’re a developer, a-hem — because it gives you a window into what your average owner’s Wii set up looks like. Hence, what kinds of games might sell better than others.
Over 21% of the Wii remotes in the market come from sales of Wii Play, while 34% come from the sales of the Wii remote as an accessory. On average, 3 out of 4 Wii owners have purchased an extra controller that wasn’t packaged with a game. Moreover, nearly 1 in 2 Wii owners have purchased a copy of Wii Play, which makes it highly likely that the median number of Wii remotes per console is right at 2. Simply put, most Wii owners would appear equipped to play multiplayer games, a fact that may guide publishers as they design new software for the system.
On a related note, if they weren’t so expensive (and controllers in general are expensive these days, motion sensing or not), I would have said Nintendo should have included two Wiimotes with Wii Sports in their “all inclusive” system. However, this would have driven up the buy in cost and the entire point of the system would have been muddied. Such is life.
Does this mean more party games are incoming? The haters would say yes, but please remember that the original NES came with two controllers, as did the SNES; and “party games” and “mini games” were no more prevalent on those systems because of that fact. Instead, I’d like to see a resurgence of the days when 2-player co-op (or more!) was a little more popular than it is today (Halo 3, for example)
How many you guys got? I have two, and I bought them both back in November.