Wii U wasn’t the only console to gain US sales last month as Vita sales rocket

Both Nintendo’s Wii U and Sony’s PlayStation Vita boasted impressive sales gains in the US last month.

Grabbing the headlines has been Wii U, which sold 60k units in the US in May – that’s 85 per cent up on the previous month and 90 per cent up on May 2013.

However, also up was PlayStation Vita with may sales of 56k units. That’s a staggering 1,600 per cent month-on-month increase over April when just 3k units were sold.

The reasons? For Wii U, it’s the arrival of Mario Kart. The Vita situation is more complicated, with both the release of the Vita Slim Borderlands 2 bundle and the scarcity of stock over previous months likely playing a part.

There is one similarity between the two, however – both machines will need to keep posting annual gains if these short term boosts are to have any meaningful impact.

Of course, the real winner in the US May sales race was PS4, which outsold Microsoft’s rival Xbox One for the fifth month in a row. Whether it can do the same in June following the console’s Kinect-free price drop remains to be seen.