Sales of video games and the hardware associated with them in the United States showed a steep rise since January 2007 and gained another 20 percent over last year’s totals during the month of April.

What’s driving this big demand? Nintendo’s Wii console as well as the new Pokemon games for Nintendo’s DS handheld.

As we reported on Slice of SciFi, by the close of 2006 the Wii was the top-selling new game console by December 31, 2006 and showed no signs of abating. Its sales have now grown siginificantly for the fourth month in a row since the start of the new year, selling 360,000 gaming units at $250 (US) a pop.

“The demand has just blown the doors off. We’re chugging along as fast as we can,” Perrin Kaplan, Nintendo’s vice president of marketing, told Reuters reporter Scott Hillis.

In the EU market, another gaming giant, Electronic Arts (EA) recently told journalist Gavin Haycock that the European race for entertainment will determine how the battle for gamers on consoles, computers and cell phones is won and lost in that sector of the global market. Haycock went on to state that, “Two key challenges in the industry are which gaming products Europeans single out as their top picks and what success firms have in improving technology. This will also influence how far cell phones go in driving revenues across the industry.”

“I believe the biggest fight will be in Europe,” Gerhard Florin, Electronic Arts’ international publishing head, told the audience at the Technology, Media and Telecoms summit in Paris this week.

“Whoever wins the hardware war in Europe, most likely will be the overall winner,” he said, referring to leading players such as Microsoft Corp., Sony Corp. and Nintendo Co., with their Xbox 360, PlayStation 3 and Wii respectively.