Looks like February was a pretty good month for video game hardware, despite the ongoing lackluster economic performance worldwide. According to NPD's released data for last month, hardware "strongly outperformed market expectations", with every console strongly outperforming their respective expected sales. So the retailers' fear that more people will buy less games was not as apocalyptic as they thought, after all.

For example, the Wii was expected to sell 669, 300 but instead sold 753,000 (oh, and yes, they do remain on top of the food chain yet again). This is followed by the Wii's next of kin, the DS, with an expected 492,000 sales, but exceeded to run away with 588,000.

 

Software was also sparkly in February as sales were almost 10% ahead of expectations. In fact, total video game software sales jumped up 9% from US$ 673.3 million to US$ 733.5 million.

Speaking of software, the Xbox 360 version of Street Fighter IV takes the second biggest slice of the pie, with 446,000 copies sold. This number translates to 65.5% more than the expected number of sales. Ka-ching! The PS3 version sat at number 3.

Which title was the number 1? Wii Fit with 559,800 expected units sold, and 644,000 actual units sold. Well, summer's just around the corner after all. It's not that hard to imagine why people would be cramming to get fit (*cough*guilty*cough).

As for the PS3's golden boy, Killzone 2, it broke the charts at #5, with a total of 323,000 units sold.

 

Congratulations to the "winners" of February!

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