Charts: US December - Nintendo is a winner!

The results of the American holiday sales are in and there is no surprise as to who is the big winner. It is also clear who is the biggest loser of the bunch. That is Nintendo (winner) and Sony (loser) if you hadn't guessed it by now.

The only question is how many Wii systems Nintendo could have sold had there not been shortages. I guess we shall never know. Meanwhile Nintendo DS broke a new single month sales record and became the first game system to register more than 3 million units sold in a month in the US. Oh, and Wii Play took top honors for software. Microsoft saw a healthy increase year-over-year in Xbox 360 sales, while all Playstation formats decreased in sales compared to last December. December also marked the first month were sales of video games, consoles and accessories topped the $5 billion mark (more than $21 billion in 2008).

An interesting note is that combined Guitar Hero and Rock Band dollar sales increased 16% year-over-year. Putting a dent in the doom and gloom prophecies for the music genre. However, the more expensive packs with resulting smaller unit sales should have an adverse effect on DLC sales. Then again one could argue that if you have already spent a fortune on acquiring a full set of instrument you will also spend more on extra songs. Time will tell whether adding drums and singing to Guitar Hero was a wise move or whether Neversoft and Activision Blizzard should have stayed the course.

Other interesting things of note:

Gears of War 2 sells almost exactly the same amount of copies in December as Halo 3 did last year. Of course, the comparison is not entirely fair as Halo 3 released in September and sold a massive 4.1 million copies up until December last year. Despite this it is clear that the Gears of War franchise deserves to be mentioned in the same sentence as Halo.

Two games - Wii Play (w/ remote) and Mario Kart Wii (w/ wheel) - managed to outsell last year's best selling game Halo 2 (4.82 million).

World at War didn't quite reach up to Modern Warfare's sales of last December, but the power of the Call of Duty franchise is undeniable regardless of who developed the game.

It is also interesting to note that Left 4 Dead topped a million in sales on Xbox 360 in the US in just two months something The Orange Box failed to do.

For the full year Wii manages to sell more than 10 million units, with Nintendo DS coming up just short of that mark. Xbox 360 came a few hundred thousand short of 5 million units sold, while PS3 climbed over 3.5 million just beaten by the PSP.

The December NPD solidifies the impression that Nintendo are the only company making big bucks in the industry these days. And while Microsoft, EA and Activision Blizzard all have something to cheer about it is the smaller and midsized publishers who have taken a real beating by the changing landscape that is video game sales. As always it would have been interesting to see a deeper sales chart for December as titles outside the top 10 are bound to have recorded impressive numbers.

Hardware:
1. Nintendo DS 3.02 million (2007: 2.47 million)
2. Wii 2.15 million (2007: 1.35 million)
3. Xbox 360 1.44 million (2007: 1.25 million)
4. PSP 1.02 million (2007: 1.06 million)
5. PS3 726000 (2007: 797800)
6. PS2 410000 (2007: 1.1 million)

Software:
1. Wii Play (w/ remote) (Wii) 1.46 million
2. Call of Duty: World at War (Xbox 360) 1.33 million
3. Wii Fit (w/ Balance Board) (Wii) 999000
4. Mario Kart Wii (w/ wheel) (Wii) 878000
5. Guitar Hero: World Tour (all versions) (Wii) 859000
6. Gears of War 2 (Xbox 360) 745000
7. Left 4 Dead (Xbox 360) 629000
8. Mario Kart DS (DS) 540000
9. Call of Duty: World at War (PS3) 533000
10. Animal Crossing: City Folk (Wii) 497000

Top selling games of 2008:
1. Wii Play (w/ remote) (Wii) 5.28 million
2. Mario Kart Wii (w/ wheel) (Wii) 5.00 million
3. Wii Fit (w/ Balance Board) (Wii) 4.53 million
4. Super Smash Bros. Brawl (Wii) 4.17 million
5. Grand Theft Auto IV (Xbox 360) 3.29 million
6. Call of Duty: World at War (Xbox 360) 2.75 million
7. Gears of War 2 (Xbox 360) 2.31 million
8. Grand Theft Auto IV (PS3) 1.89 million
9. Madden NFL 09 (Xbox 360) 1.87 million
10. Mario Kart DS (DS) 1.65 million

Source: NPD