Wii Fit Leads Black Friday Sales

Nintendo's Wii console and Wii Fit were among the top must-haves for the key Black Friday retail day following Thanksgiving, and online retailers especially noted that Wii and its peripherals were top searches on sites like eBay and Shopping.com. Online auction site eBay and transaction site PayPal saw boosts in their usage over the holiday weekend of 34 and 26 percent respectively, Reuters reports. And, according to comments from Lazard Capital Markets analyst Colin Sebastian made available to Gamasutra, Wii consoles continued to sell above their official retail price on eBay throughout the weekend. Sebastian says that sales within the game industry overall were "fairly brisk" over the holiday weekend, and expects results will ultimately show that they grew over the same period last year. Sebastian concurs with the results in Reuters' report: "Not surprisingly, our checks indicate that the most popular video game products over the weekend included the Wii and Wii Fit (Nintendo), Xbox 360 hardware bundles and Gears of War 2 (Microsoft), and Call of Duty V (ATVI)." "With three days of holiday sales now under the belt, our conversations with industry contacts suggest cautious optimism for the remaining three weeks of the shopping season," says the analyst -- although he cautions that Need For Speed Undercover, Rock Band and Guitar Hero represent "soft patches" in the market. The band games in particular, Sebastian says, might be "exhibiting some fatigue following several years of strong growth."