Nintendo to ship 400,000 Wii units for Japan debut
The game console launch will offer four times as many machines as Sony did for its PlayStation 3 debut last week.
The Japanese video game maker also said it plans to ship 1.5 million units of its hot-selling handheld game player, the DS, in December in Japan, doubling the availability from levels in recent months for the critical year-end shopping season.
The Wii, which features a novel motion-sensitive controller, will go on sale in the United States on Sunday and on December 2 in Japan, competing with Microsoft's Xbox 360 and Sony's PS3 for holiday shoppers' attention.
Nintendo declined to comment on the scale of Wii shipments for the U.S. launch.
Supplies of the PS3 had been limited after a glitch in blue laser diode production delayed commercial output of the console.
Sony, which sold nearly a million units of the earlier PlayStation 2 console in the first three days of sales in Japan in 2000, shipped only 100,000 PS3s for the Japan debut on Saturday.