NPD: October Sales Up 18% As Wii, Fable II Top Charts  The United States video game industry saw total year-over-year growth of 18 percent in October to $1.31 billion in sales, apparently shouldering the broader economic storm, according to the latest monthly sales data from tracking firm NPD.

October software sales grew 35 percent to $696.79 million, significantly outpacing some analyst estimates and heavily contributing to the overall growth, while hardware sales were only marginally up, gaining 5 percent to $494.74 million.

As usual, Nintendo’s two current hardware platforms took the top hardware slot — and while most platforms stayed in roughly the same sales ballpark as last month, Wii sales jumped well over 100,000 units to 803,000 units.

Meanwhile, Microsoft missed its claimed two-to-one sales dominance over the PS3, but only by a slim 9,000 units, with the Xbox 360 at 371,000 and the PlayStation at 190,000 units sold.

This month’s hardware sales chart is as follows:

Wii - 803,000
Nintendo DS - 491,000
Xbox 360 - 371,000
PSP - 193,000
PlayStation 3 - 190,000
PlayStation 2 - 136,000

On the software side, Lionhead and Microsoft’s Xbox 360 exclusive Fable II took the lead, despite only being on the market for a small part of the month — it launched on October 21st.

In addition, the Xbox 360 version of Fallout 3 slid into third after an even smaller period on shelves — it debuted October 28th. Nintendo’s first-party stalwarts held their positions, and SOCOM and LittleBigPlanet were the two PlayStation 3 titles lower down in the top 10.

The full top 10 NPD-tracked game chart for October 2008 is as follows:

1. Fable II (Xbox 360, Microsoft) - 790,000
2. Wii Fit (Wii, Nintendo) - 487,000
3. Fallout 3 (Xbox 360, Bethesda) - 375,000
4. Mario Kart Wii (Wii, Nintendo) - 290,000
5. Wii Play w/ Wii remote (Wii, Nintendo) - 282,000
6. Saints Row 2 (Xbox 360, THQ) - 270,000
7. SOCOM: U.S. Navy Seals Confrontation (PS3, Sony) - 231,000
8. LittleBigPlanet (PS3, Sony) - 215,000
9. NBA 2K9 (Xbox 360, Take-Two) - 202,000
10. Dead Space (Xbox 360) - EA - 193,000