The never-ending battle between the game consoles makers brings out the best from the companies involved, with the top three market leaders taking turns at the number one spot.

Monitoring the ups and downs is a well-known consumer product research group called the NPD Group, which releases from time to time the best sellers and also figures recorded by the company. NPD announced that for the past several months Nintendo has been holding on strong to the first sales position, dominating all the other companies across the United States. One of its main attributes is the fact that it put out two popular products at the same time: the Nintendo DS and also Wii. This month the trend stayed the same, with Nintendo selling 518,000 DSs and 453,000 Wii consoles.

"Across hardware, software and accessories, products for the Wii platform contributed 28% of total industry dollar sales for the month of August," explained NPD analyst Anita Frazier about Nintendo’s significantly large console sales. Nintendo managed to sell 12 million Wiis and 22 million DS units this season.

A very distant second is the PlayStation 3, topped in sales by Nintendo with more than 330,000 units.

"Despite smaller growth this month, the industry is up 32 percent year-to-date and remains on target to achieve annual revenues in the range of $22 to $24 billion," added Anita Frazier, referring to the industry’s first single-digit growth overall in the past 27 months.

She also talked about the games released this year "Madden NFL 09 was the top-selling game of the month, and launched with 2.3 million units out of retail doors in its first month, besting last year's (Madden NFL 08) title by 2%," said Ms. Frazier. "Year after year, the industry can count on the Madden release to bring folks into stores during the relatively lazy days of late summer."

The bestselling football game, even if it is in its 20th year, managed to get a hold of the top three slots among the month's top sellers. Microsoft Xbox 360’s version was the No. 1 game, with a total of 1 million copies, followed by the Sony PlayStation 3 version with a total of 643,000 copies and the PS2 version with 425,400 units. The Nintendo Wii version did not do as well, selling only 115,800 which placed it at number 9 on NPD's monthly chart.

Nintendo is setting up its campaign for the upcoming holiday season, looking to keep the current sales trend and even take it further. One of the main focuses is to make sure that stores will not encounter any sort of shortages this Christmas, whether is a console or a certain game. "We are hard at work like Santa's elves making sure that consumers who go into retail this holiday season are able to find what they are looking for," says Denise Kaigler, vice president of corporate affairs for Nintendo of America.

According to the NPD, U.S. sales of video game hardware, software, and accessories totaled $1.08 billion in August, with software sales up 13 percent and hardware sales up by 3 percent.