US: MS claims Xbox 360 sell-out

Microsoft’s community voice Larry ‘Major Nelson’ Hyrb has claimed that the platform holder had such a successful Christmas in America that it actually ran our of hardware by the end of the period.

"I found out we ran out of consoles at end of the month so [we] don’t expect to win December," he said on Twitter of the upcoming NPD report for the region.

"Jan/Feb supply is tight as well. Likely amazing year-on-year growth numbers for Xbox. We’ll find out tomorrow!"

Earlier this week analyst Michael Pachter predicted Xbox 360 December hardware sales of 2.5m units in the US, just behind 2.6m Wii sales but far ahead of Sony’s anticipated 1.2m PS3 console unit sales.

Last week Microsoft claimed it had sold 8m Kinect cameras since its launch in November, though it later transpired this was in fact a shipped figure.