Nintendo's Wii has surpassed Microsoft's Xbox 360 as the best selling games console in the US.

During June, 666,000 Wii consoles were sold in the US, according to NPD Group, the market research specialist, raising its total sales count in America to 10.9 million units.

Nintendo's console is now selling more than Microsoft’s Xbox 360, which went on the market a year before the Wii was released in November 2006. Nintendo is also leading sales of handheld consoles. Its DS portable device sold more than 783,000 in the US during June to raise total sales to 20.8 million units.

Wii sales were reported to have overtaken the Xbox 360 globally last September. In the UK, Wii surpassed the Xbox 360 cumulative sales in December last year, according to the MCV trade magazine.

In the US during June, Sony PlayStation 3 console sales jumped 94 per cent from the previous month. US consumers bought 405,500 PlayStation 3 consoles, up from 208,700 consoles in May.

Microsoft sold 219,800 Xbox 360 consoles, a 17.8 per cent increase from May. The biggest seller of all time, last generation’s Sony machine, the PlayStation 2, is also still thriving.

Konami Corp’s “Metal Gear Solid 4” helped to fuel the dramatic increase in the number of Sony PlayStation 3 units sold.

“Metal Gear Solid 4” claimed the top slot as June’s best-selling game, overtaking the two-month reign of “Grand Theft Auto 4”, produced by Take-Two Interactive Software.

Overall revenue in the video game industry is soaring. In the US, it generated $8.3 billion in sales in the first half of 2008, a 36 per cent increase on the same period in 2007.

“These numbers are mind boggingly large,” said Michael Pachter, an analyst at Wedbush Morgan. “Clearly we have an expanded demographic, more than just hardcore gamers, and they have an insatiable appetite for video games.”

Of June’s top 10 best-selling game list in the US, six are made for Nintendo hardware, including the month’s second place top-seller, Activision Blizzard Inc’s “Guitar Hero On Tour”, for the DS handheld.

Other top games included “Wii Play”, and “Wii Fit”.

The industry is set for at least another year or two of strong growth, driven by geographical expansion, a strong hardware line-up and growing pool of casual gamers.

The figures come at the end of the week of the Electronic Entertainment Expo in Los Angeles where the big three manufacturers competed with a series of announcements of new games and console updates.

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