2007: It was neck & neck PlayStation vs Wii in the U.S

Mike Bantick
Monday, 21 January 2008 09:00

Your IT - Entertainment

With the video game industry soaring to new heights in 2007, it’s a big money business, with some of the biggest corporations scratching and clawing for your gaming dollar.  NPD group have recently released the year end sales figures, and first in line were the execs from Nintendo, Sony and Microsoft.

Almost US$18 billion was outlaid for video game items in the U.S last year, up a whopping 43 percent over 2006.  So it is unsurprising that there is a clamouring to know who got a slice of the pie and how big a size they got.

The U.S, it is claimed, is Microsoft’s home ground, with the extensive game library of the Xbox 360 seemingly more orientated towards Western tastes, with contrasting floundering sales in Japan.

Despite this, the Xbox 360 with 4.62 million units sold came in a distant third behind the Nintendo power house gaming hardware options.

The world beating Nintendo hand-held, the DS entranced 8.5 million Americans, whilst the DS’s big brother the Wii swung into 6.29 million U.S households.

Not to be outdone, the Sony behemoth is gathering momentum; the current generation consoles, the PlayStation 3 (2.56 million) and hand-held PlayStation Portable (3.82 million) were popular.  Not as popular as their spiritual dad, the venerable PlayStation 2 however, which continued to sell well racking up 3.97 million.

Ignoring the hand-held market for the moment, this meant that more PlayStation branded consoles headed indoors (6.53 million) than the Nintendo Wii, though Nintendo would be continuing to rub hands together with glee as the Wii is immensely more profitable than the expensive PS3.

Given the popularity of hand-held consoles, with the new and slimmer PSP introduced last year, one could easily image Microsoft looking for a slice of the action as soon as possible.  Watch this space.

How about Software?  What were the biggest games of 2007 for U.S consumers, click on to find out.