For the first time ever Xbox sales top Wii and PS3 worldwide

This news should be causing more than a few smiles in Redmond as the news that the Xbox 360 beat out Nintendo’s Wii and Sony’s Playstation 3 when it comes to worldwide sales for the first time ever.

It’s old news for for the Microsoft gaming console to beat out its competition nationally but it has never bested either one of them, let alone both, in the global gaming console marketplace.

The news of this champagne popping news came after Sony released its earning report yesterday which showed that the company had only sold 6.5 million units worldwide over the holiday quarter and when it combined with Nintendo’s sales of only 5.6 million for the Wii in the same quarter it showed both companies coming in behind Xbox 360’s sales of 8.2 million.

Now according to the team over at GeekWire this is the first time since 2006 that Xbox has lead worldwide holiday sales which is the same time that both the PS3 and Wii were just being launched.

Here’s the bigger news: The Xbox 360?s strong holiday quarter also put the Microsoft console ahead in worldwide sales globally for the full year of 2011, with 14.9 million units sold, compared with 14.1 million for the PS3 and 10.33 million for the Wii.

According to our data, compiled from historical earnings reports, it’s first time the Xbox 360 has topped the worldwide console market for a full year of head-to-head competition with the PS3 and Wii.

via GeekWire

Congrats to Microsoft and the Xbox team.