• The Seattle Times, Friday, February 13, 2009 11:45 AM

The video game biz continues to defy the recession, according to stellar January sales numbers from NPD Group. Both the Xbox 360 and Nintendo's Wii saw solid year-over-year sales gains of 34% and a whopping 148%, respectively. The only bad news came from Sony, whose PlayStation 3 saw its third consecutive month of lower sales compared to a year earlier. As a whole, the U.S. video games industry saw sales of $1.33 billion in January, up 13% from January 2008.

Nintendo sold 679,200 Wiis in January, Microsoft sold 309,000 Xbox 360s and Sony sold 203,200 PS3s. Nintendo leads the next gen console race with 18.2 million Wiis sold, compared to 14.2 million for the Xbox 360, and 7.0 million for the PS3.

Interestingly enough, hardware sales, with growth of 17%, were stronger than software sales, which grew 10% year-over-year. "At this point in the console lifecycle, we would expect to see a greater percentage of total industry sales generated by software sales, but the continued strength in hardware sales is changing that scenario a bit," NPD analyst Anita Frazier said in an email. "This will have a long-term positive impact on the industry as the user base expands."

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