Unit sales of video game consoles in the USA were down significantly both sequentially and year over year in January ’08, recent figures from NPD group show. Microsoft Corp., Nintendo and observers said the reason of unit sales decline were supply constraints. However, those constraints did not dethrone Nintendo Wii and even allowed Sony PlayStation 3 to outsell both PlayStation 2 and Xbox 360.

“Given the huge number of hardware systems sold in December, inventory shortages could be the biggest contributor to the softer than expected sales,” said NPD analyst Anita Frazier.

Sales of all four non-portable game consoles available on the U.S. market were very close and totaled 1.037 million units. Approximately 274 thousand Nintendo Wii game consoles were purchased in January, about 269 thousand of gamers acquired Sony PlayStation 3 game system, whereas Sony PlayStation 2 was sold through in 264 thousand units quantity. Microsoft Xbox 360 was the worst sold game console in January with 230 thousand systems purchased.

Portable game consoles also suffered substantial declines in the first month of the year: only 251 thousand Nintendo DS were sold through and only 230 thousand of Sony PlayStation Portable devices were acquired.

Both Microsoft and Nintendo, which hardware sales suffered the biggest decline, attributed poor sales to hardware shortages, which occurred because of the fact that both vendors wanted to sell as much hardware as possible back in December.

“We are really running short of product here in the United States. You could say we misjudged demand. We’re literally out of stock in many stores. […] Retailers have been really upset, they are on allocation. It is a lag I think we’re seeing in January and that may continue into February, then as spring ramps up, we'll be able to meet that demand,” Jeff Bell, head of global marketing for Microsoft’s games business, said in an interview with Reuters news-agency.

“[Our] attempts to get as many Wiis and Nintendo DS systems into stores for the holiday season resulted in being tightly constrained from an in-stock position through the month of January,” said Nintendo of America president Reggie Fils-Aime, reports USA Today web-site.

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Who knows, some like the ps3 some like the xbox360. They have their own fans.