January Sales Show Wii Still Winning

Video game sales figures for January show Nintendo's Wii still winning the month, despite increased competition and supply shortages.

New video game sales figures from NPD covering January 2008 show the Nintendo Wii continued to beat out rivals, despite ongoing supply shortages and aggressive marketing by the competition.

During January, NPD says Nintendo managed to sell 274,000 Wii consoles in the United States, with Sony selling 269,000 PlayStation 3 systems and Microsoft moving 230,000 Xbox 360s. Overall sales figures dropped 6 percent compared to January of last year, in part because this year’s period covers four weeks of sales instead of five. On a weekly basis, sales were up 18 percent compared to a year ago.

Microsoft has already said it could have sold more consoles if it had been able to get them into stores, and Nintendo is well into its second year of supply constraints limiting sales of its still hard-to-find Wii console. The notion of shortages after strong December sales was also echoed by NPD’s Anita Frazier in the report: “Given the huge number of hardware systems sold in December, inventory shortages could be the biggest contributor to the softer-than-expected sales.”

Nintendo also sold 251,000 Nintendo DS handheld gaming systems during the month, while Sony sold 230,000 PSPs.

The top-selling console game for the month was Call of Duty 4 for the Xbox 360, moving almost 331,000 copies. Other top sellers for the month includes Wii Play, and the Wii version of Guitar Hero III, which sold 298,000 copies and 240,000 copies, respectively.