The Christmas sales are in the past, and it is time for the aftermath - how did the co called console war kicked off. It is no surprise that it was not a good Christmas for Sony. The release of the PlayStation 3 was too close to Chritsmas, so they could not fully capitalize from this season. Capitalize, however, is a wrong choice of words, as Sony most likely makes heavy losses per unit sold, until the economics of scale start to kick in. It would seem that Sony only tried to distract the Xbox 360 and Wii buyers to stall their decision making.

Microsoft sold a nice 2M units of Xbox 360 in the U.S. market, during November-December. Not a bad figure, but interestingly Nintendo Wii scored only 0.2M less! In that sense the sales figures of Xbox in it's home field are not anything to brag about.

NPD Group reported that preliminary estimates indicate Microsoft’s Xbox 360 as a winner of the consoles’ war in the US, with approximately 2 million units sold between November and December 2006. On second place came Nintendo Wii, with approximately 1.8 million pieces sold since its launch in November on the American territory. As expected, the biggest of them all- the PS3- came in third place, with an estimated number of 750,000 consoles having found their owners for the same period.

What is interesting is Wii’s performance: Nintendo managed to not only beat the hell out of Sony’s rival, but also to seriously compete with Microsoft’s product, which was already enjoying a strong momentum on the market.

Source: Playfuls.com