Silver linings and wispy grey clouds abound in the land where the sun rises, and Enterbrain has just announced that the Wii has attained seven million sales in its home territory. Bosh!

That’s quite an achievement in the two years since the machine launched in Japan, and it veritably hoses over the installed user bases of its next-gen competitors - around 2.5 million for PS3 and 800K for the still struggling Xbox 360 according to latest estimates. However it does seem that the Japanese public’s appetite for waving their arms around is on the wane…

You see, the bulk of the Wii’s sales have been in its first year - five million between launch in December ‘06 and January ‘08, and Nintendo managed to shift another million by May of this year. So, factoring in the extra sales up to the point of this announcement (November 23rd), we make that a 60% decline year-on-year. Not great considering the humongous and largely untapped casual gamer market the console is supposed to be opening up.

Then again they year’s not over yet and, as Kotaku notes, there may be an unexpected benefit if Nintendo tries to jazz sales up with new colour variants. Heck, they’ve already decided to change their trad red logo to a cool, uber modern grey. Moreover, though, Nintendo is still kicking console butt globally, with over 37 million units sold worldwide - that’s 14 million ahead of the 360 and 20 million above the PS3. There’s the good old DS to consider too, nearly 87 million sold to date, and rising rapidly since the launch of the DSi. No need to write them off just yet, then.