Sony, Nintendo Have Super Thanksgiving Weekend, Microsoft Silent On Sales

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Sony and Nintendo have revealed their sales numbers from this past Thanksgiving weekend (AKA – holiday shopping super weekend), and despite an economic recession and the steep price of video games and their consoles – they did surprisingly well. Mircosoft has been vaguely quiet on how they made out this past week.

Going with Nintendo first, the company announced that they sold an incredible 550,000 Wii consoles during Thanksgiving weekend, but what’s really incredible is that they sold over 1 million DS handhelds during the same timeframe. (Of course, the DS was considerably cheaper, with some US retailers selling the DS for under $100). This past week was Nintendo’s best for handheld single-week sales, breaking the previous record set by the Game Boy Advance in 2002.

Sony also reported booming sales, something to the tune of 440,000 units sold over the Thanksgiving week. According to tech blog Ars Technica, last year, Sony sold 378,000 units of the console in the entire month of November, which is a considerable boost from year-to-year. The new slim model, which was released two months ago, probably helped sales some as it is cheaper than previous offerings.

Now, Microsoft has yet to publicly say anything, aside from a mysterious tweet from a executive. Aaron Greenberg reported that last week was the “biggest sales week of the year for the 360″ and that sales were “2x from the previous week”. Without exact numbers, aside from a vague “2x”, it’s easy to imply that Microsoft didn’t do as well as they hoped. I would venture to guess that both the Wii and PS3 did a lot more than double their previous week’s sales. Admittedly, we don’t know if they did good or bad, but without knowing, I think most of us will assume the worse.

At any rate, at least two of the three did well during the high-profile holiday shopping week, a good sign for the video game industry and the slumming tech economy overall.