On Wednesday, Microsoft Corp proudly announced that its Xbox 360 managed to go past the 10 million unit mark in the U.S. before Nintendo Co Ltd's Wii and Sony Corp's PS3.

"History has shown us that the first company to reach 10 million in console sales wins the generation battle," Don Mattrick, a Microsoft senior vice president, said.

A sales situation was released by market research firm NPD, which placed the Wii on a close second place with sales of no less than 8.8 million units recorded until the end of March. Sony came in a bit behind with 4.1 million PS3 units.

However, in the global perspective, the situation is quite different. Last year, although it was extremely popular in the United States, Microsoft’s Xbox 360 has started to experience slow sales on the Japanese market. However, for June 2007 for example, Nintendo’s Wii game console has outsold Sony’s PlayStation 3 by a ratio of over 6 to 1, and Xbox by a ratio of about 2 to 1 on the Japanese market. Xbox had had the advantage of being released ahead of Wii and PlayStation, but its hardware failures made its rivals win the battle.

Still, Microsoft is going strong with its 12 million game players registered on the Xbox Live system and the 16 games that have sold more than 1 million copies each.