Nintendo Wii keeps 1st position in the battle of video game consoles. Xbox 360 keeps its advantage over the PS3. This follows a price cut from the Microsoft console that made Xbox 360 the cheapest of them all, $50 less than the Wii and half the price of the PlayStation 3. Even if it is said that September is a slow month, this year it was the slowest since March 2006, and one reason might be the harsh economic conditions. According to the new NPD sales statistics presented on Thursday, Nintendo sold 687,000 Wii consoles and the Xbox 360 outsold the Sony PS3 again with 347,200 units (PS3 only sold 232,400).

The games chart (this does not include the PC ones) shows that 4 of the top ten games are from Nintendo. The top-selling video game in September is Star Wars: The Force Unleashed. It brought Nintendo sales of 223,000 and placed Xbox 360 first, with 610,000. As for the PC games, Spore realized sales of 406,000 units and Warhammer Online: Age of Reckoning sold 274,000, which would put both of them in the top ten list of combined console, portable, and PC games sales for the month.

Even if these numbers do not necessarily point out, there’s a 7% decrease in the sales market for video games. We can only assume that this was caused by the economic crisis or by the lack of a video game like Halo 3 last year, who would have given a boost to the sales. U.S. sales of video game hardware, software and other related products totaled $1.27 billion in September with software sales falling 6 percent and hardware sales down 9 percent.