Market researcher NDP has released its year-end sales numbers for video games and, as expected, 2007 was a record year for the industry with $17.94 billion of non-PC hardware, software, and accessories sold in the US at retail. That's a 43% jump from 2006.
Unsurprisingly, the year's most popular console was the Nintendo Wii with 6.29 million units sold. But if you thought Nintendo had some impressive numbers with the Wii you might want to take a look at the numbers they pulled off with the DS. Nintendo's handheld device was by far the year's best-selling gaming system with 8.5 million units sold, 2.5 million of them in December alone.
Nintendo's Wii was followed by the Xbox 360 with a respectable 4.62 million, the PlayStation 2 at 3.97 million and PlayStation 3 with 2.56 million consoles sold. Though the PS3 still lagged behind its rivals, it's had a huge turnaround since Sony slashed the console's price by $100 and launched a low-end model last fall, with 797,600 consoles sold during December. By comparison, Sony sold just 121,000 units in October.
On the software side, the top-selling game of 2007 was Halo 3 for Microsoft's Xbox, which has sold 4.8 million copies since its launch. Guitar Hero, however, was the best selling franchise for 2007, bringing in $820 million in retail sales between its various Guitar Hero 2 and 3 games across consoles.