360 Reaches 18m But Rivals Catching Up

Nintendo has a date for when it will become the best-selling new console in the US.

Sales of the Xbox 360 are on the up, reaching another milestone, the company has revealed.

Cumulative worldwide sales of the Xbox 360 now stand at over 18 million units, Microsoft's John Schappert told Eurogamer in an interview after his keynote address at this week's Game Developers Conference in San Francisco. But Schappert stopped short of making any predictions about sales of the console during 2008.

At the same time, though, one of the Xbox 360's rivals is catching up quickly.

Even though it launched a year after the Xbox 360 and has been hard to find in stores for much of the time, the Wii is on track to surpass the Xbox 360 this year.

Reggie Fils-Aime, the president of Nintendo in the US, told Bloomberg that the Wii would become the top-selling console in the US by June.

The PlayStation 3 is making inroads into Microsoft's lead too. The PlayStation 3 outsold the Xbox 360 again in January, according to sales figures recently released by research firm NPD Group.

It is not, however, over yet for Microsoft, which is determined to make good in regions where it's weak.

"We are hitting the ball out of the park in North America and I think that there's regions of Europe where we're not doing as well as we'd like to do, and we have room for improvement," Schappert told Eurogamer.

"Those are renewed areas and key areas of focus for us."

Alex Wollenschlaeger
Editor, Kikizo