The most significant story to emerge from The NPD Group's December review of retail sales in the WoW cataclysm Gold game industry across the US was the record-breaking sales of Nintendo's Wii and DS which sold a total of 3.6 million units in November. But yesterday also showed an increase in interest in handheld and console games. With a successful debut of the Microsoft's Gears of War 2 and Activision's WoW?Cataclysm?Classic, sales in this category increased by 11 percent from year to year.

The NPD Group segments off its desktop software sales from its handheld and console report, the amount doesn't take into account one of the biggest games of the year: Blizzard Entertainment's WoW?Cataclysm?Classic: Wrath of the Lich King. The week before, NPD also revealed sales ratings for PC games released in November and, unsurprisingly, Lich King and its collector's edition won the top and second slots.According to NPD analyst Anaita Frzier on the day, Wrath of the Lich King sold more than 1.4 million units in its first month. This is just one portion of the game's opening-day global numbers that Activision Blizzard pegged at 2.8 million within a few hours of the WOW expansion's launch. At the end of October, Blizzard tainment announced that its massively popular massively multiplayer online game had breached the 11-million-subscriber mark.

WoW?Cataclysm?Classic subscribers hail from many regions and countries that include North America, Europe, China, Korea, Australia, New Zealand, Singapore, Thailand, Malaysia, Chile, Argentina, Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Macau. In the last few months, WOW was launched in Russia as well as Latin America.

There aren't many SKUs from WoW?Cataclysm?Classic to dominate the top 10 list but the WOW Battle Chest -- which includes all of the game's original content as well as the first expansion, Burning Crusade, was a contender for the sixth slot. The strong performance was complemented by its console cousins, WoW?Cataclysm?Classic also did well on the PC making it the third spot on the rankings.

Despite being the most pirated game in 2008, Will Wright and EA Maxis Sim-Everything Spore nonetheless managed to sell significant amounts of legal units. They chalked fourth place in November. WoW Cataclysm Classic Gold for sale The Sims 2 Double Deluxe and The Sims 2 Apartment Life Expansion Pack were ranked eighth and seventh.