Videogame industry had an awesome 2006

The year 2006 saw launch of two of the most anticipated gaming consoles. Sony launched their Sony Playstation 3 gaming console while Nintendo came out with the highly innovative Nintendo Wii.

The month of December proved to be awesome for the video gaming industry and it helped the year to see record sales of $12.5 billion in 2006 in the US alone.

This included the sales from the software, hardware and accessories related to the videogaming consoles.
Considering the two new consoles were launched only in the later stages of the year, the sales were dominated by the older consoles including the Playstation 2 and the Microsoft’s Xbox range of consoles.

The portable gaming consoles also helped the industry as Nintendo led in the month of December with Nintendo DS selling 1.6 million units in December.

Sony managed to sell 1.4 million units of their older generation PS2 gaming console in December. Their PS3 console sold 490,700 units in December.

Nintendo had sold 1.1 million units of their Wii gaming console in the US market till the end of the year 2006.

Microsoft’s “Gears of War” for the Xbox 360 dominated the sales in the December month with 815,700 units sold. “Guitar Hero II” for the PS2 was the second most popular game in that month.