Wii Still Dominates Console Sales

Despite strong Xbox sales over Thanksgiving weekend, Microsoft couldn’t match the demand for the Nintendo Wii.

The independent game sales tracking group NPD has reported that the Wii is still the hottest console out there, outselling the Xbox by nearly 3-to-1 last month. Here’s the breakdown of November shipments:

Wii: 2.04 million units

Xbox: 866,000 units

PS3: 378,000 units

The Nintendo DS continues to dominate as well, shipping 1.57 million units –blowing away the second place Sony PSP’s 421,000 shipments.

The Wii and DS now hold the #1 and #2 hardware sales records for for the month of November, by moving the most units ever in a non-December month.

Since it’s release in November 2006, the Wii console has sold 15.4 million units in the U.S. , and Nintendo DS has sold nearly 24.6 million since launching in November 2004.

Nintendo’s games sold well too. Four of the top ten US titles were published by Nintendo ( Guitar Hero World Tour made the list too, but the Wii version is only a portion of the total). Here’s the list:

1. Gears of War 2 (Epic, Xbox 360) - 1.56 million
2. Call of Duty: World at War (Treyarch, Xbox 360) - 1.41 million
3. Wii Play (Nintendo, Wii) - 796,000
4. Wii Fit (Nintendo, Wii) - 697,000
5. Mario Kart Wii (Nintendo, Wii) - 637,000
6. Call of Duty: World at War (Treyarch, PS3) - 597,000
7. Guitar Hero World Tour (Vicarious Visions, Wii) - 475,000
8. Left 4 Dead (Valve, Xbox 360) - 410,000
9. Resistance 2 (Insomniac, PS3) - 385,000
10. Wii Music (Nintendo, Wii) - 297,000

I was in a local GameStop yesterday and they had just received about a dozen Wiis and 7 people were in line waiting to buy them. The store manager said that while it is not as hard to find one this year (more are being shipped), they still sell out pretty quickly.