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After exceeding expectations last month, the NPD data for the month of March 2009 now shows a lot of dips in hardware sales. Has the video game industry's resilience to the economic crunch finally been broken?While Nintendo's wii console is still in the top spot with 601,000 units sold, sales went down 152,000 units compared to last month's. Sales of the second-place DS also went down to 563,000 from last month's 588,000 units sold.The same thing happened to Sony's consoles, the PlayStation 3 and PlayStation Portable. While the dip isn't as big as the Wii, the 4th-place PS3 only sold 218,000 units in March. The PSP, in last place, also went down to 168,000 units in March from February's 199,000 figure.Sales for Microsoft's xbox 360 console also went down to 330,000, a 61,000 unit difference from last month's sales of 391,000. The console managed to place third in the sales rankings. Microsoft remained optimistic, though, pointing out that year-over-year, sales in March 2009 actually we

Echoing what happened in the US, hardware sales took a big hit in Japan during the week starting April 6 and ending April 12. Unlike in the US, though, sales of Microsoft's xbox 360 actually increased.The combined sales for Nintendo's DS and DSi handhelds still retained the top spot, but the sony psp actually managed to outsell the DSi by moving 40,886 units compared to the DSi's 40,673. The DS Lite was in last place with 6,869 (not counting the PS2).The sony playstation 3 ended up in third place with 16,701 units sold. The Wii dropped down to fourth place, selling only 13,349 units compared to last week's sales of 15,525.It's still dead last in Japan's 7th-gen home console race, but as I mentioned earlier, the Xbox 360 was the only console - home or handheld - that managed to sell more units this week compared to the last. Xbox 360 sales went up by 2,322 units for a final figure of 10,134 units sold. On the software side, Capcom's PSP title Basara Battle Heroes debuted in the n