Nintendo surges ahead in Japanese hardware sales

Sales of Nintendo hardware continue to break away from the competition in Japan, with the DS enjoying sales of well over 100,000 units a week.

Even though sales of the handheld dropped for the week ended June 3, the 123,211 units sold still leaves behind Sony's PSP, which during the same period managed 26,358 units sold.

Year-to-date sales of the DS are now almost 3.5 million, compared to just under 1 million of the PSP.

Nintendo's Wii is also setting a fair distance between itself and rival home consoles from Sony and Microsoft.

In the past week the console sold 69,748 units, a rise of 11,000, bringing the year-to-date total to over 1.6 million units.

Sony's PlayStation 3 sold 8,998 units during the same period, with year-to-date figures reaching 453,179.

Sales of Microsoft's Xbox 360 climbed marginally by under 200 units with the console managing 2,219 sales in the past week, bringing year-to-date figures to 101,944.

Despite being technically superseded by the new model, the PlayStation 2 has managed to sell more units that the PS3, with 11,814 shifted, and year-to-date figures of 369,024.