Xbox 360 outsells PS3 2 to 1

By Mike Bantick
Friday, 16 January 2009 05:37

Entertainment

U.S. sales figures have been released for December and despite the GEC (yep! The Global Economic Crisis has earned an acronym) the video game industry continues to flourish.  Microsoft will be happy with a continued sales lead of the Xbox 360 over rival Sony PlayStation 3, but nobody will be surprised with Nintendo’s dais position.

NPD group have released December hardware and software sales in the video game market.

In total 2008’s December saw an increase of nine percent over the same time in 2007, reaching US$5.29 billion.  This brought the final year total video game sales to a whopping US$21.33 billion, eclipsing 2007 by 19 percent.

Hardware wise, U.S consumers only spend two percent more in December than the same time the year before, distributing the US$1.88 billion mainly on Nintendo products.

In fact over 5 million Nintendo branded consoles went into U.S. homes during the festive month, 3 million DS and 2.1 million Wii consoles are now being played through the winter.

Microsoft sold 1.4 million Xbox 360’s and Sony saw the PSP handheld top a million sold with the PlayStation 3 managing 726 thousand units sold.  The complete details follow.

* Nintendo DS - 3,040,000
* Wii - 2,150,000
* Xbox 360 - 1,440,000
* PSP - 1,020,000
* PlayStation 3 - 726,000
* PlayStation 2 - 410,000
 
Despite the lower ranked sales positions, and the fact sales of the PS3 were down 100K from December 2007, actual sales of the PlayStation 3 over 2008 was an increase of 40 percent from 2007.

Software details on page 2