This morning the NPD Group released their July sales preview. While the monthly data that NPD typically sends out is hard numbers, these are all predictions based on their analysis of early sales. Those hard numbers won't be hitting till later this month.

The in-depth packet doesn't give us predictions of the top selling games of the month across the board, it does tell us that the group believes that the Wii will manage to outsell the Playstaiton 3 and Xbox 360 combined in July and than the DS will approach tripling Playstation Portable sales.

According to the predictions, the Playstation 3 will see a sizable drop this month in sales down more than 130,000 consoles to 235, 447 while the Xbox 360 wil see a drop of 105,000. The Wii's drop will be a predicted and substantial 170,455.

Here are the raw predictions for July 2008:

Nintendo DS 625,445
Nintendo Wii 612,545
Sony PSP 235,447
Sony PS3 275,444
Microsoft Xbox 360 325,488

NPD says they believe that the Xbox 360's lead over the PS3 this month will be due to the price cut of the 360's 20GB Pro model. The NPD analysis also says that they are uncertain if the 360 and PS3 will receive price cuts before the end of the year, but that if they come it will come from Microsoft first, with Sony following suit.