One year! One year was enough for Nintendo Wii to become the leader of the video games consoles market. Launched in November 2006 Nintendo Wii didn’t seem to be able to get through Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3’s rivalry, due to its inferior technical specifications.

But Nintendo Wii had a good price and an innovative gameplay and only one month after its release, it went atop the hardware gaming sales charts.

It’s true that there are still two months until the end of 2007 and many surprises could still appear, but it is unlikely that Wii’s position will change in the next period, if we consider its sales from the last years or just the sales charts from October.

According to the data released by NPD Group during October, Nintendo Wii proved once again that it was not only “a one time wonder” and it sold 519,000 units, compared to Microsoft’s Xbox 360, which sold 366,000. As for Sony, PlayStation 3 sold only 121,000 units. However, Sony has just introduced the 40 GB hard disc PlayStation 3, which cost only $400, so its November sales could be stimulated by this decision.

Ever since the price of PlayStation 3 was announced, Sony has been heavily criticized for its decision to put a price tag of $600 on a gaming console. Sony argued that given the technical specifications, the price is right, but the last few months have demonstrated that the gamers had another opinion. Now, Sony is struggling to put PlayStation 3 back on track, with a new version and price cuts.

Last week Sony issued a press release saying that “SCEA expects a great deal of momentum moving forward this holiday and beyond with the availability of new PS3 hardware and pricing.  Based on internal data, the company is already seeing a great spike in sales with a 192% lift for the PS3 over the past two weeks.   In fact, as reported by Howard Stringer, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of Sony Corporation of America, 100,000 units of the PlayStation 3 were sold at retail just last week.”

Anyway, even if it would sell the double amount of PlayStation 3 consoles, Sony could just hope to level Xbox 360’s sales.

On the other hand, Microsoft spent a lot of attention on the preparations for the end of the year, and released Xbox 360 Arcade (announced in late October), a version that is sold for $279.99 and includes five family-friendly games, a wireless controller, a high-definition multimedia interface (HDMI) connection to enable high-definition output if desired and 256 MB of memory useful for storing games and entertainment content.

Xbox 360 Arcade could be the best Nintendo Wii competitor so far. Also Microsoft has a great holiday line-up with titles such as Halo 3, Madden NFL ’08 or the Guitar Hero franchise.

Furthermore, later this month in November, Microsoft will release the role-playing game Mass Effect for Xbox 360 so it is very likely for Xbox 360 to succeed in maintaining its position compared to Nintendo Wii. The distance between Nintendo Wii and Xbox 360 might even be reduced, but it’s hard to believe Microsoft’s device won’t surpass Wii in the next months.

Practically, at the moment Nintendo Wii doesn’t have a real rival to compete with, except itself. Nintendo needs just to be able to meet the market’s demand and to produce enough Wiis. The company is currently evaluating how to distribute the consoles it is producing, in order to balance the different markets. The US market is expected to absorb as many consoles as Nintendo can ship here, which means that Nintendo Wii will top again the gaming hardware charts.