More than 67 million Xbox 360 consoles have been sold in the U.S. since it first launched in 2005, Microsoft revealed this week, while the company has generated over $56 billion in retail sales from the console.

Yusuf Mehdi, the CMO of Microsoft's Interactive Entertainment Division, says on the Microsoft blog the Xbox 360 holds a 47 percent share of the current-generation console market in the U.S., based on data acquired by the NPD Group.

He put the continued success of the console down to strong sales of the motion-control Kinect technology, and new Xbox Live entertainment options.

More than 19 million Kinect hardware units have now been sold, he said, and Xbox Live has over 40 million members. Xbox Live subscribers spend an average of 84 hours per month on the console, according to Mehdi.

These figures compare to the 66 million Xbox 360s and the 18 million Kinects sold by January of this year. Before that, Microsoft had said that 57.3 million Xbox 360s had been sold by October 2011.

However, while Mehdi was keen to note that sales of the Xbox 360 are "defying gravity" and continue to increase year-over-year, there are signs that the Xbox 360 is slowing down.

During Microsoft's third quarter of the current fiscal year, Xbox 360 consoles shipped were roughly half of what was shipped during the same quarter of the previous year.

[Update: Microsoft updated its blog to clarify that the Xbox 360's 47 percent share in the current-genreation console market applies only to the U.S.]