GAMES: VIDEO GAMING

List: Top Ten Bestselling Video Games in USA (all consoles) in 2006

Date: January 2007

Source: NPD

Base: By video games point-of-sales data in USA during the year.

Notes: According to NPD, the U.S. video game industry retailed $12.5 billion in 2006. The chistmas month saw total sales hit $3.7 billion. Software sales for December totaled $1.7 billion. During December hardware sold strongly, totaling $1.6 billion. The Nintendo DS handheld sold 1.6 million units in December making a total of 9.2 million since launch. The PSP did well also, selling 953,000 units (6.7 million life-to-date). Nintendo's GBA came third among the portables with 850,000 unit sales (35.1 million life-to-date). Sony's aging PS2 console posted 1.4 million units in sales in December and stood at 37.1 million life-to-date. The Xbox 360 posted 1.1 million units sold in December (4.5 million life-to-date). The two new systems, Wii and PS3, posted 604,000 units and 490,000 units, respectively. NPD's data shows that the Wii install base through December in the U.S. stood at 1.1 million while the PS3 total was 687,000. Annually, total hardware sales were $4.6 billion driven primarily by console hardware, which came in at $2.9 billion. On the software side, 2006 total sales amounted to $6.5 billion. This was broken down into $4.8 billion in console software and $1.7 billion in portable software. Accessory sales were up 18.9 percent in 2006 as well, totaling $1.5 billion. EA's Madden on the PS2 was the best selling game of 2006 with 2.8 million units sold. New Super Mario Bros for the NDS was second with 2 million units. Gears of War for the Xbox 360 (including the collector's edition) made 1.8 million units, Kingdom Hearts on PS2 1.7 mn,. Guitar Hero II (including the standalone copy of the game with out guitar) on the PS2. Sold 1.3 mn. The best selling Wii game was Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess which racked up 519,000 unit sales in the month of December alone.