For the first time the Wii console has streaked past Microsoft's Xbox 360 to become the biggest selling games machine in the world.

According to figures from the VG Chartz website, the market is split up into two large orange slices and one piece of Satsuma.

That's a roundabout way of saying that the Nintendo Wii has sold 10.57 million consoles worldwide (41.6 per cent); Microsoft's Xbox 360 has sold 10.51 million (41.4 per cent); and poor cousin the Sony PS3 sits in third place with 4.32 million consoles sold (17 per cent).

The VG Chartz sales monitoring website, which crowned the Wii king, claims it is more accurate than its competitors who use shipping figures rather than sales data. 
"VG Chartz collects data directly from retailers all over the world," says a statement on the site.

"Retailer sample sizes are small compared to professional tracking services, but are large enough to provide very accurate projections of the latest console sell-through figures worldwide."

Meanwhile, it was independent sales tracking company Chart Track which broke the good news about the Wii's one million UK sales.

That makes Nintendo's games console the fastest-selling home console in UK history and gives the Wii 68 per cent of the UK console market.

According to Nintendo, the Wii passed the one million sales figure in just 38 weeks, which is 11 weeks faster than the PlayStation 2's 50 weeks and 22 weeks faster than the Xbox 360, which took 60 weeks to reach one million UK sales.

"The non-stop demand for Wii even in the traditionally slow sales periods for videogames in the UK is clearly behind this record-breaking achievement," said David Yarnton, Nintendo UK's general manager.