Despite a small 6% dip in quarterly sales year-over-year, “due to a decrease in sales in the game business resulting primarily from unfavorable foreign exchange rates,” Sony’s Networked Products & Services group, which houses the PlayStation brand, managed to post ¥45.7 billion (about $564 million) in profits for the third quarter period, which ended December 31. That’s a 135% gain over the prior-year’s period.

Even though quarterly sales of the PlayStation 3 and PSP have lagged year-over-year, Sony is predicting 15 million PS3 consoles sold for the fiscal year, compared to 13 million for the year prior. This has a lot to do with “cost reductions” on the PS3 and significant gains in PlayStation 3 software sales. So things are looking great for the PS3 right now. As for the PSP and PS2, not so much.

We finally have the US launch details of the Nintendo 3DS. The price is $249.99 and the release date is March 27, while Europeans will get it on March 25. Nintendo says that “30+” games will be available in the US during the launch, with more than 25 in Europe.

Europeans will have some exclusive 3D video content like sports footage and episodes of Shaun the Sheep. Not sure if we are getting anything exclusive or not. We will know soon enough.

Despite a poor economy leading to poorer sales than the company was used too, Nintendo has announced that it still ended up with the best selling gaming systems of 2010 according to numbers from the NPD Group. The Wii was the best selling game console for the year with 7 million units sold in2010. Not bad at all.

Likewise, the DS was the best selling portable with 8.5 million sold in 2010. Nintendo had great sales during the holiday season, with some impressive sales numbers in December to help it along.

In a recent interview about the 3DS, Shigeru Miyamoto revealed that the company wants to include 3D video in the future. Obviously that’s no guarantee that this feature will be added to the handheld’s 3D camera, but we might just find ourselves shooting low-res 3D video with the 3DS at some point in the future if all goes well.

I don’t know about you, but I would rather have them concentrate on battery life, so we can play for longer.

Nintendo has some high hopes for their 3DS. And well they should since they had impressive sales last year. Nintendo’s president Satoru Iwata has laid down some ambitious goals for the company’s latest portable. He expects the 3DS to sell 4 million units by the end of March.

That would mean about 1.5 million units in Japan and another 2.5 million units everywhere else. The 3DS should be available in Japan on February 26th, with the US and European markets following in March. We are gonna go out on a limb and say they meet their goal and have an earlier US release.

Christmas is here, so companies are watching their sales figures closely and outing those numbers. Christmas time is definitely a time when people are buying consoles, so how is Sony doing this year? Well, Sony’s PlayStation 3 is selling very well.

For the fiscal year ending March 31st, 2011, Sony is on track to sell 15 million PS3 consoles. If you are keeping score, that’s up over 15% from last year’s 13 million consoles. Sony also announced that it sold 4.1 million PlayStation Move controllers in just two months.

The Xbox 360 outsold the Nintendo Wii in November with sales of 1.37 million Xbox 360s sold against 1.27 million Wiis. sadly for Sony, the PS3 was third with 530,000 consoles sold. However, when Nintendo’s DS hand-held is added to the equation, Nintendo sold a total of 2.7 million consoles in November.

Compared with sales this time last year, the Xbox 360 is up 67 percent while Nintendo held steady, recording 10,000 more sales this year. Sony sold 25 percent fewer PS3 consoles this November when compared to its November 2009 performance, when Sony sold nearly 200,000 more consoles.

Sony’s PlayStation Move motion controller is definitely moving across Europe. Sony Europe’s Andrew House noted “very significant sales” for the Move, saying that it has sold “somewhere in the region of 1.5 million units for the new controller across just Europe.” Sales have exceeded Sony’s original hopes, so it looks like the company will likely increase production of the peripheral.

Sales may not be as great in America, however. In a report released to the media, Wedbush Morgan’s Michael Pachter estimated that the motion controller sold roughly 300,000 units in its US debut. That includes Move console bundles; though SCEA has not released official sales figures yet.

Speculation is that Nintendo’s upcoming 3DS portable 3D gaming handheld could be powered by Marvell. Marvell co-founder Sehat Sutardja dropped some hints during their quarterly earnings call. He says that Marvell chips will soon be used to power a game console.

“Approximately 15% of the sequential increase (in quarterly sales) was due to the initial production revenue from our ARMADA application processors, primarily as a result of a major customer preparing to launch a new gaming platform,”

Nintendo must be pretty happy with the news that the Wii video game console has now sold 30 million units in the US alone. That figure was achieved in just 45 months, making it the fastest-selling console in the history of the industry. Wow.

It also hit the milestone 15 months faster than the next best-selling console. Obviously this is due to the Wii’s innovative gaming experience, even if some consoles do end up collecting dust after a few months when the novelty wears off.

Sony saw the sales of its PS3 increase significantly, when the price was cut and the PS3 Slim hit the market. The console is still selling decently and fans in Japan will have a new color with a couple new features to choose from soon.

The new PS3 console will be offered in the existing black color and can be had in white as well. The console is replacing the current 120GB and 250GB HDDs with new 160GB and 320GB HDDs.

People like their consoles like they like their supermodels, thin and puking. Well, thin anyway. With two nice round buttons in front. But nevermind that. The newly launched Xbox 360 has sold 15,000 units in Japan in the first four days. The strong sales were in addition to 2,370 of the previous generation version of the games console. The week before the release saw only 2,060 Xbox units of any kind moved.

Sales were helped by the launch of Capcom’s top-selling game, Monster Hunter Frontier Online. In Japan the new slim console costs $339 while the previous Elite version dropped to $282.

When the Nintendo Wii was released, people called it gimmicky with it’s motion controller, but in spite of that, the console has done really well. But the fact that it’s aging and doesn’t have many grown-up games may be shortening it’s life as a console.

According to Nintendo’s fiscal report, the company sold 20.53 million Wii consoles last year, which is a 21 percent drop from the 25.95 million from the previous year. However this is still Nintendo’s third-best year ever. Will sales of the Wii pick up? I’m not seeing it.

I have all three game consoles in my house and my son and his friends spend lots of time playing games around here most weeks. When it comes time to play games they all typically want to play the PS3 the most. The Wii is the second choice and they rarely play the Xbox 360.

Despite the preferences of a bunch of 7-year-olds, the Xbox 360 has taken the top spot for sales in February according to NPD. NPD’s numbers show that Microsoft sold 422,000 Xbox 360 consoles; the Wii was second with 397,900 units sold.

We’re not talking the same kind of Wii shortages that happened when the Wii was popular, but Sony is now cautioning PlayStation 3 buyers that supplies will be tight. Sony’s senior director of corporate communications, Patrick Seybold, says that they are working hard, but “demand is tremendously high for the PS3 and we expect tight inventory in the coming months.”

Console sales in general slowed down in January, but are expected to pick up. Let us know if you have any trouble finding a PS3. We haven’t heard of any problems yet.