Nintendo Wii Sales Still Tops

Nintendo(NTDOY Quote) remains unstoppable in the latest cycle of video game consoles.

Sales of the company's popular Wii console ranked ahead of its rivals, Sony's(SNE Quote) PlayStation 3 and Microsoft's(MSFT Quote) Xbox 360, according to the data released by the NPD group for the period March 4 to April 7.

The Wii sold 259,000 devices and came in third overall, followed by the Xbox 360 at 199,000 units. The PS3 sold 130,000 units, said NPD.

Nintendo's handheld DS topped sales with 508,000 consoles sold in March, followed by sales of 280,000 of Sony's PlayStation 2 console, To date, Nintendo has sold 10.4 million DS handhelds, while the PS2, which launched in 2000, has sold 38 million units.

Overall, video game industry sales, including hardware and software, rose 33% to $1.1 billion during the period. Overall hardware sales grew 69% over the same period last year to $370 million, and software sales posted 15% growth to $574 million compared to last year.

Console hardware sales grew 93% to $257 million in the March 4-to-April 7 period, said NPD.

For Sony, the data offered mixed news. While the company's older PS2 console continued to outsell newer offerings from competitors, sales of its latest PS3 console has a long way to go.

Still, Sony put a positive spin on the results. "PS3 was the only next-generation console to see a gain in March," the company said in a statement. "While PS3 saw a month-over-month increase of 2% with sales of 129,638 units, we continued to find ourselves supply constrained in March due to the shift in manufacturing focus to the PS3 PAL version to support the launch of the system in Europe." Sony launched the PS3 in Europe on March 23.