Nintendo's Wii retains the top position

The festive season is long gone, but the sales of Wii are still topping in the video game consoles. Wii was on the top of the charts for November and December with the video games in large demand.

US video game industry sales were sky high last year with record sales of 17.9 billion dollars. Nintendo emerged as a leader of the console battle with Microsoft and Sony. The U.S. video games industry soared an astounding 43% in 2007 with record sales in every product category, according to a report released by the NPD group on Thursday.

The Wii finished the year as the top-selling console, with nearly 6.3 million units sold in US. Xbox 360 sold 4.6 million units and nearly 2.6 million units of the PS3 were sold in the year, according to NPD data.

In the month of December also, the Nintendo Wii came first with sales of 1.35 million units compared with 1.26 million units for the Xbox 360 and 797,600 units for the PlayStation 3.

Wii’s demand was so high that some stores even starting black-marketing the gaming console at higher prices. Game stores called Slackers took undue benefit of Nintendo Wii scarcity by selling the product online on eBay at extremely high prices.

The PS3 sales were slow to begin with but it saw a huge boost in sales over the last two months thanks to a sharp price reduction for the console, which was launched in late 2006 at the high price of $600.

For game software, sales totaled more than $8.6 billion in the U.S. for the year, up by 34% from 2006.

The top-selling game for December was "Call of Duty 4" from Activision Inc., which sold nearly 1.5 million units. Activision also had the No. 3 spot "Guitar Hero III" for the PlayStation 2, which sold 1.25 million units. Nintendo's "Super Mario Galaxy" for the Wii grabbed the number two slot with 1.4 million copies sold.

Overall “Halo 3” emerged as the best selling game of 2007 with sales of 4.8 million copies and this is supposed to be a main reason behind the good sales of Microsoft’s Xbox 360 in the recent months.

Commenting on “Halo 3” NPD analyst Anita Frazier said, “This performance certainly puts it among the elite in gaming history with performance similar to that of GTA: Vice City in 2002, and GTA: San Andreas and Halo 2 in 2004."

Experts think that next year more focus will be on software and hardware sales will decline unless the companies come up with new innovative products.

"While we will continue to see strong hardware sales, particularly if prices come down again, the spotlight now turns from hardware to software," said Frazier.