Handheld Game Units Dominate Fall Sales

NPD sales data for the month of October shows strong support for handheld gaming.

Nintendo DS was the second best-selling platform right behind Wii and PSP sold better than PlayStation 2 and PlayStation 3.

Of course, Wii trounced the competition nearly 2:1 thanks to well over 800,000 in sales. Microsoft couldn't even move half of that with Xbox 360 chiming in at a respectable 370k. Lower sales didn't affect the reception of Xbox 360-exclusive Fable II, though. Peter Molyneux's much anticipated sequel was top of the charts with 790k copies sold.

Charming titles performed extremely well in October, as PlayStation 3-exclusive LittleBigPlanet made a littlebig debut at number 8 on the October charts with a solid 215k copies.

Not a single handheld game made it into the top ten, interestingly. Phenomenal hardware sales--almost half a million for DS and just shy of 200,000 for PSP--aren't translating to game sales. That may be a factor of consumer demand for multimedia content and not just gaming alone.