Nintendo's Wii outsells Xbox 360 and PS3 in January

Among the trio of next generation gaming consoles, Nintendo has emerged as the numero uno in sales after selling 436,000 Wii video game consoles in January, outshining both its rivals Microsoft’s Xbox 360 and Sony’s PlayStation 3 in the US video game consoles market.

According to the new market data provided by market research firm NPD, US gamers mostly fetched Nintendo Wii video games console, which helped it easily soar past Xbox 360 in sales and open a huge lead over the PS3.

The second best-selling console was Sony's 7-year-old PlayStation 2, which moved 299,000 units and outsold Microsoft's Xbox 360 with merely 5000 units and Sony's newer but more expensive PS3 with nearly 300,000 units.

According to NPD Group’s research data, Microsoft's Xbox 360 sold 294,000 units, while Sony's Playstation 3 sold 244,000 units. The high-end versions of these machines are priced at $US400 and $US600, respectively.

Launched in November, Nintendo’s Wii console retails for $US250 and features a motion-sensing controller that has helped build buzz for the machine.

Comparing their sales with the rivals, Perrin Kaplan, vice president of marketing at Nintendo of America said, "I do think that we're selling to additional and different customers" adding that "We've had an incredibly healthy start and we think there's going to be a pretty long tail on this product."

Nintendo’s innovative gaming unit also boasted four of the top 10 best selling game titles. It had four games in January’s top 10 games: two for the Wii, one for its DS handheld and one for its last-generation console, the Gamecube. The rank wise four titles are: "WarioWare: Smooth Wii Nintendo Moves", at No. 4, "Legend of Zelda: Wii Nintendo Twilight Princess", at No. 5, "Legend of Zelda: Gamecube Nintendo Twilight Princess", at No. 7, "New Super Mario Nintendo DS Nintendo Brothers", at No. 10.

“Lost Planet: Extreme Condition”, a game for the Xbox 360 from Japanese publisher Capcom in which players fight aliens across an icy world, hit the top rank in the game sales charts.

Besides the Lost Planet game that sold 329,000 copies, the other two hit games for the Xbox 360 are Microsoft's "Gears of War" at No. 3 and French publisher Ubisoft's Tom Clancy's Rainbow Six: Vegas at No. 9.

Sony had one game, “Resistance: Fall of Man”, at No. 8 for the PS3, and PlayStation 2 hit two titles, a guitar simulator, at No. 3 and a football game, at No. 6.

During the holiday shopping season in December, Microsoft sold 1.1 million Xbox consoles, while Nintendo sold 604,000 Wii consoles and Sony sold 490,700 PS3 machines.

The overall market of video game hardware and software came up with booming results. The total sales hit $US1.3 billion in January, with game sales surging over 50% to $US549 million, though NPD added that was to some extent aggrandized due to its January 2007 data covering several more days than January 2006.

After release of the figures of strong Wii sales, the analysts are expecting a big boom from the Nintendo’s innovative unit that would likely be successful in drawing entire families into video gaming.

According to a report published in Financial Times, Yoshiyuki Kinoshita, an analyst at Merrill Lynch, has predicted that by 2011, one-third of all Japanese households and 30% of all US households will own a Wii.