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Saturday, August 25, 2007

Wii is the Top Selling Console in United States


These days, every one seems to be quoting the NPD figures! Now Nintendo has sent word that Wii has emerged as the month’s best-selling video game system of any type in the United States and achieved its highest weekly sales rates since December.

In fact, Nintendo quotes independent NPD Group as well as the internal Nintendo figures. They also indicated that the Wii and Nintendo DS remained the two best-selling video game systems in the United States, with Nintendo hardware outselling all other systems combined.
Here are some facts that Nintendo sent over:
Nintendo remained the top U.S. game publisher for the sixth consecutive month.
So far this year, Nintendo titles claim six of the industry’s top 10 best sellers, including the top three: Pokemon Diamond (overall No. 1) and Pokemon Pearl (No. 3) for Nintendo DS, and Wii Play (No. 2) for Wii.
Nintendo DS, with more than 300 titles available, has the largest game library for any current generation system.
Wii has added new titles (averaging nine per month since launch) at a faster rate than any other new home system.
Including an ever-increasing library of classic titles available for download on the Wii Shop Channel, American owners of Nintendo DS and Wii will have a combined selection of nearly 800 games to choose from by year end.
Nintendo expects momentum for both systems to continue, given the Aug. 20 launch of Brain Age 2: More Training in Minutes a Day for Nintendo DS and the upcoming Aug. 27 launch of the hugely anticipated Metroid Prime 3: Corruption for Wii.
Wii may be the best selling console, but then Sony’s PS3 too is catching up. You might remember a few days ago that analyst Michael Pachter had also said that the PS3 could overtake the Xbox 360 but the Wii would still be on the top. However, Mariam Sughayer, who happens to be an analyst relations manager at Sony, says that they are happy with the figures.
Mariam Sughayer wrote on the PlayStation.Blog, “Today, the much anticipated NPD numbers were released and we’re very excited about how great July was for video games. If you didn’t know, NPD is the organization that tracks sales of videogames in the U.S. According to NPD, the industry continues to boom with sales of $925.52 million dollars for the month of July – that’s a 37% increase for the industry since this time last year. From a PlayStation perspective, coming out of E3 we were really anticipating a good reaction to our new hardware pricing announced on July 9th, and we were obviously very pleased to see that PS3 sales increased with 159K units sold at retail for the month of July, which puts us up 61% over June numbers.”
All in all, the month has been very good for video game consoles and it looks like video gaming firms are enjoying the holiday period earlier than expected!

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