The news we’ve brought you this week prove that our beloved video games are now more popular than ever, even though in Japan things don’t look great at the moment. We have Microsoft selling consoles better than ever, we have Nintendo breaking records all over again, things are looking great overall. And if you are wondering just how great, the ELSPA has some final numbers.

And the numbers are clear: the games market has more than doubled over the past five years, and a incredible 23% increase compared to last years sales was recorded (adding to a total of £1.9 in income). Now let’s see how did the consoles do in 2008!

Nintendo leads the way, with 40 million software units – 20 million of which were Wii games, which further means that sales recorded a 153% increase compared to the last year. Even the DS software sales increased with 23 percent, from14.9 million last year to 19.1 million in 2008.

Second in software sales was Microsoft, with almost 15 million Xbox 360 games sold last year, which means that sales increased 51 percent. An impressive increase was marked by good PS3 software sales, retailers selling 145% more than last year. Still, the final number of sales was of 10.4 million units, which means that Sony only grabs the last place.