Wii Win Again... For Second Month

It's a cliche, but it's true: Twice is always nice for anyone looking to conquer the opposition.

That is true even in that rare instance when you come back strong after they essentially write you off as an also-ran.

In the case of Nintendo (Pink Sheets: NTDOY), that means takint the sales lead in the United States for two months in a row. According to research firm NPD, stong sales for the February reporting period place the company's Wii and DS platforms above the competition, making the two gadgets the top console and handheld videogame platforms with per-unit sales figures of 335,000 and 485,000, respectively. That's on top of an equally-strong January sales period for both platforms, when the Wii sold 435,503 and the DS 239,000. The retiring GameCube platform, meanwhile, sold just 24,000 as fans of Nintendo's bigest franchises begin to shift to the Wii, while the Game Boy Advance added an additional 136,000 units for Nintendo. All told, about 54 percent of videogame hardware sales were generated by Nintendo platforms.

As for the rest of the industry, Microsoft's (NASDAQ: MSFT) Xbox 360 sold 228,000 for a decent second place in the next-gen videogame market and forth overall, beaten only by Nintendo and Sony (NYSE: SNE) platforms as the PlayStation 2 continued its strong lead of the departing (but not yet out of the building) generation of consoles with per-unit sales of about 295,000 while the original Xbox was barely on the map with only 480 units sold. The PSP, sold about 176,000 units and still beat out the faltering PlayStation 3, which by comparison only sold about 127,000 units.

On the software sales front, Xbox 360 games took half of the top ten with five entries, led by Crackdown at 427,000 units and rounded out by NBA Street Homecourt with per-unit sales of about 102,000. Four games for Nintendo platforms took 40 percent of the top ten, with the PS2 title Guitar Hero 2 taking the remaining entry and corresponding ten percent. The complete top ten per-unit videogame sales list is as follows:

01. Crackdown (360) 427,000
02. Wii Play W/Remote (Wii) 371,000
03. Diddy Kong Racing (DS) 262,000
04. Legend Of Zelda, The: Twilight Princess (Wii) 130,000
05. Guitar Hero 2 W/Guitar (PS2) 130,000
06. Gears Of War (360) 119,000
07. Major League Baseball 2k7 (360) 113,000
08. Lost Planet: Extreme Condition (360) 111,000
09. Warioware: Smooth Moves (Wii) 109,000
10. NBA Street Homecourt (360) 102,000

For reference purposes, please view the following source articles:
http://www.vooks.net/modules.php?module=article&id=11558
http://www.associatedcontent.com/article/157494/nintendo_takes_january_sales_lead_in.html