They have more consoles sold. Of course they are going to sell more. Won the core gamer my ass. NA's core game is only 12,000,000? Keep celebrating victory George Bush, but this whole thing hasn't even started yet. If the Xbox360 moves more hardware in NA this year, then they can say they won the core gamer.

Partially true IMO . In the US they did captate a pretty big ammount of gamers . The question is for how long will they be able to keep it . The Wii is allready extremly close to their numbers , and the PS3s upcoming lineup could steal away a chunk from them ...

We're talking hardcore gamers. People who buy a Wii to only play games like Wii Sports or Wii Play or Wii Fit are not hardcore gamers. The fact that the majority of hardcore third party games are being made for the 360 says a lot about who has the hardcore gamers.

The Wii has both Nintendo hardcore gamers and casuals but anyone who thinks that it's not the casuals fueling the majority of sales for that system are only kidding themselves.

Again, why have we decided FPS, Racing, and Sports gamers are now core gamers? The people who buy nothing but Halo and a yearly Madden are no more core than those who buy Wii Fit.

What they are is casual teenagers looking for the next bloody head-exploding game.  These people have no idea what E3 is.  They don't read reviews, watch for upcomming titles, or pay attention to the gaming press. They are casual.

This is why the term core gamer is so over-used.  People can't get it through their heads that 90% of gamers are casual.  There aren't a million different levels of it.  They are all casual.  Just because they are different demographics doesn't mean one group is anymore "core" than another.  If you really think those 14 year olds calling everyone "gay" on Xbox Live are core gamers, then I have to say it's an awful category to be included in. 

 Agreed. Just like the people who buy a 360 or PS3 just to play Madden, Halo 3, or CoD4 are not "hardcore" gamers.

Casuals fuel the majority of sales for any console that makes more than a blip on the radar.

Look if you want to consider core gamers different than what everyone in the industry and the majority outside of it consider as core gamers then go ahead.  Heck it looks like you want to pretend that there is no such thing as a core gamer, more power to you.

How can you claim to have won the NA core gamer when the Wii continues to catch you at a fast pace? This time next year 360 will be comfortably 2nd place in NA with lower software sales. That would prove they have won nothing.

Everyone in the industry? The only people I've seen who lable FPS, sports, and racers as core games are Microsoft and the people making the games themselves. Sony and Nintendo both have different definitions. Square Enix certainly does. I'm pretty sure Namco doesn't consider all their RPGs casual.

What Microsoft has is a single group of Western casuals. Nothing more.

Added.

I really don't really know when sports and racing nuts became "core" but they certainly aren't. Then again I can't even pinpoint when the BS "core vs. casual" labels started popping up.

The fact is that being a "core" or "casual" gamer has nothing to do with what you play.  Watch the video of the guy who got a perfect score on Wii Play's Shooting Gallery sometime.  None of you (or me) can do that.  Not even close. 

Really, the lable is pretty stupid because people can be a "core gamer" and play any kind of game, but if you do want to have the lable it shouldn't matter what you play, it should matter how you play.  If you actually spend time reading game information and looking up future releases, you are probably a core gamer.  If you just buy what you saw advertised on TV yesterday, you probably aren't. 

The amount of people who actually do pay attention to gaming media and news is tiny, and they are divided reasonably equally among all the consoles.