Jan 18, 2011 18:31 GMT  ·  By

Monthly data from the NPD Group, which tracks hardware and video games sales for North America, has shown that Nintendo, especially with the Wii home console, has lost sales during the entirety of 2010, but the company says that, despite the slowdowns in units moved, it is still leading its competitors when all of 2010 is taken into account.

The Nintendo DS handheld family has managed to sell more than 8.5 million units during the year while the Wii has also sold over 7 million home console to top the Xbox 360 from Microsoft and the PlayStation 3 from Sony.

Charlie Scibetta, who is the senior director of corporate communications at Nintendo of America, stated, “Nintendo has sold more game systems than anyone else for five years running. Of the quarter billion hardware systems sold in the United States during the past 10 years, Nintendo sold more than half. We look forward to bringing fun new experiences to consumers when Nintendo 3DS launches in March.”

The company also says that 13 of the top 25 best-selling titles of 2010 have been released on Nintendo platforms during the past year and that the best performers have been games like Epic Mickey, Just Dance from Ubisoft and New Super Mario Bros.

Since early in 2010, Nintendo has insisted that there are a lot of people that have experience playing games on the Wii and that are interested in picking it up despite the strong competition from both Sony and Microsoft, who are slashing prices on their consoles and are adding motion tracking via Move and Kinect.

Nintendo also claims to have “momentum” moving into 2011, with the impending release of the 3DS handheld, which is set to allow mobile gamers to enjoy full three-dimensional gaming that on home consoles require specialized glasses.

The device will arrive in Japan on February 26 and during March in North America and Europe.