Remember that the retail calendar that NPD uses for its figures treats March as a 5-week month; to smooth out these inequities among the months, we look at weekly sales rates instead of monthly ones. In terms of weekly averages, the Nintendo Wii led with 144,200 systems per week. According to NPD, this puts its monthly sales rate ahead of any prior system's rate, outside of the Holiday sales period. Significantly behind Nintendo's console were the Xbox 360 at 52,400 systems per week and the PlayStation 3 at 51,400 systems per week. These figures are shown in the graph below.



The graph above reveals an additional bit of context for the March figures: comparing them to the previous month, February 2008. Only the Nintendo Wii saw a month-on-month increase in weekly sales while both the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 saw declines, -18% and -27%, respectively, from the previous month.

Nintendo also scored extremely high sales for its handheld, the Nintendo DS. The following chart provides the weekly sales rates for the DS and Sony's PlayStation Portable.



As the graph above demonstrates, handheld sales at a rate near 150,000 per week is remarkably high outside of the Holiday period, and the Nintendo DS has managed that feat two months running. By comparison, the PSP is modestly above its average for the six months of April to September 2007 (during its price drop, but before the Holiday period) and declined slightly from its sales rate in February 2008.

The PlayStation 2 continued its long run on the market with 43,200 systems selling each week in March 2008. For the first quarter, sales for the PlayStation 2 were down slightly from the same period a year earlier.