Japan: DS and 360 Up

The PSPgo continued to struggle in Japan during June with average weekly sales of just over 850 units.  It was outsold by its older, more backwards (in terms of compatibility) brother, the PSP-3000, by more than 26:1.  It is also probably safe to assume that it will not be helped by the expected release of the PSP-4000 later this year.

The positive hardware sales stories from Japan this June concern Nintendo and Microsoft though, not Sony whose sales performance was more or less flat over the four weeks we are examining here.  Halfway through the month Nintendo cut the price of their DS range leading to sales in the second two weeks being more than two and half times those in the first.

Microsoft also recorded sales of for its Xbox 360 in the final week of the month that look respectable when viewed alongside those for the Wii and PS3 which is a rare event in Japan.  Microsoft had delayed the release of the new 360 ‘Slim’ for a week in Japan so that it coincided with the release of Monster Hunter Frontier Online to help boost sales in its first week and that seems to have worked.

The Weekly View

With console sales starting June at more or less identical levels to those with which they had finished May the first week’s more interesting tales are all about software.  Super Mario Galaxy 2 led the software charts again with sales of over 100,000 meaning it sold more than 445,000 units in its first 11 days on sale.  With only a third of Mario’s sales the PSP title Fairy Tale Portable Guild, an anime co-op game for four players, was second.

That is a fine example of the type of game that would struggle to sell outside of Japan as the Japanese gamer’s penchant for adhoc handheld multi-player gaming does not seem to have caught on elsewhere.   Lost Planet 2 on the PS3 clung on mid-table with its 17,000 sales good enough to secure fifth spot while MGS: Peace Walker held station at number seven with its 14,000 sales helping it surpass a total of 712,000 since its release.

While Mario was forced to surrender his top spot in the software chart for the week ending 13th June,  he did pass the 500,000 unit total sales mark.  He was replaced at number one by another Wii title, Xenoblade.  Who would have thought a Wii RPG by the team who gave Japan Xenosaga could top the software chart?  It generated a modest bump in Wii sales that was enough to push it ahead of the PS3 for the first time since early May.

Of more interest to us Western observers are the two PS3 titles that débuted in the top ten this week, GTA: Episodes From Liberty City at number three and Just Cause 2 at six.  The 360 versions charted at eighteenth and twenty fourth respectively.

The week ending 20th June saw Nintendo make modest cuts to the prices of its DSi and DSi LL consoles while launching three new colours for the DSi LL.  The DS Lite was set to “open pricing” which essentially means its production, at least for the Japanese market, is likely to be stopping and retailers can sell through existing stock at whatever price it takes to shift it.  Announced on June 2nd and taking effect on the 19th those lower prices doubled DS sales compared to the previous week.

There were no significant software releases this week and Mario’s latest galactic adventure returned to the top of the chart while Xenoblade fell to fourth spot.  GTA: Episodes for the PS3 slipped to fifth and Just Cause 2 fell to twenty second, comfortably below such recent releases as Wii Fit Plus (13th, release Jan ’09) New Super Mario Bros. Wii (14th, Mar ’09) and Mario Kart Wii (17th, Oct ’08).  The Nintendo money-printing machine sure is spectacular.

The final week of the month saw DSi LLs continue to flying off the shelves in even greater numbers and the extremely rare sight of the Xbox 360 recording Japanese unit sales that not only required five digits to record but approached the levels of the Wii and PS3.  Of the 17,000 360s sold, 15,000 were the new ‘Slim’ model.  As noted above Microsoft launched their ‘Slim’ the same week as a new Monster Hunter title hit stores.  The following weeks will tell us which had the largest impact on 360 unit sales but this being Japan my money is on Monster Hunter.

Monster Hunter Frontier Online successfully completed its quest to reach the top of the week’s software chart racking up 93,000 sales which is very good going for a 360 title.  Another uniquely Japanese game, Love Plus + for the DS, a digital girlfriend simulator was second with 84,000 coming out ahead of Atelier Totori: Alchemist of Arland 2 (54,000, PS3) and Tokimeki Memorial Girl’s Side 3rd Story (52,000, DS) which sees you playing as a young woman trying to date men.  Those two DS titles are notable for being the first two to use the DS’s 4Gb (512MB) cartridges.

Got the Munchies?

Time to take a look at this month’s corporate pie.  It will have something of a bitter taste to Sony as they have been used to having the commanding share of the pudding.  In contrast Microsoft will be considerably less hungry this month while Nintendo are looking positively gluttonous with their unit sales ‘slice’ actually being over half of all the filled pastry goodness.  Numerical shares are Nintendo 55%, Sony 39% and Microsoft 6%.

And finally, as Trevor used to say, here are the numbers in tabular form in case you prefer that to the graphical.

Bonus Content: 13 Months of NPD

May’s US sales figures courtesy of the NPD Group were due out around about the time of E3 but failed to materialise.  They finally turned up this week when I was not watching but they could not escape the hawkish gaze of our biscuit-fuelled nofi.

What that meant is that while the reporting of the numbers benefited from nofi’s far superior writing talent you did not get any graphs.  Now I can put that right and take a little look back to May 2009 to see how the consoles faired compared to the same time last year.

While the home consoles all improved on their sales compared to May ’09 the opposite was true for the handhelds and markedly so.  The PS3 had the largest increase in sales with a rise of 17.9%, followed by the Wii with 15.6% and the 360 with 11.2%.  The PSP family narrowly led the handheld sales slide with a fall of 40.8% while the various DS models collaborated to record a fall of 39.4%.

Sources: Media Create and NeoGAF (for NPD data)