Japan’s November Hardware Sales

This month’s Japanese hardware sales answer one question for us. The PSPgo’s end of October sales increase following its price cut was just a temporary blip.  Despite a very strong month for PSP sales the PSPgo has seen sales fall each week.  It is sliding down through DS Lite territory and rapidly approaching parity with the PS2 once more.

Overall though November was a great month for Sony in its homeland.  Sales of a quarter of a million PSP-3000s easily beat the whole Nintendo DS range of handhelds and the PS3 comfortably outsold Uncle Ninty’s little white console that could despite a couple of strong weeks for the Wii.

Week Ending November 7th

It was tight at the top of the week’s software chart but holding onto number one was God Eater Burst on the PSP with unit sales of 61.8k.  A little over a 100 sales separated second from third as the Super Mario Collection edged out Pokemon Black & White with 56,848 sales vs. 56,719.

Winning Eleven (PES) 2011 was a similarly small distance behind in fourth with 55,809.  A new entry in post-nuclear fifth spot was Fallout: New Vegas on the PS3 with sales of 37.2k units.  Its equally radioactive 360 cousin made it to number seven with 24.1k sales.  Fissioning the two was the top ten’s only other new entry Radiant Historia an NDS RPG from Atlus.

Week Ending November 14th

Another PSP title took top spot this week with Squeenix’s Tactics Ogre: Wheel of Fortune, a remake of the 1995 SNES game Tactics Ogre: Let us Cling Together rather than a TV show tie-up, dominated the chart with 176k sales.  New PS3 release Dragon Ball Raging Blast 2 took second place with 47.6k units sold.

The hardware highlight this week came courtesy of the crimson Wii with its new lick of paint trebling its sales over the previous week.  Perhaps releasing a new colour annually rather than adding HD is all Nintendo need to do?  This was also the week new Wii hardware started being bundled with the Wiimote Plus.  Wii Sports Resort bundled with the new controller entered the chart in ninth with 14.4k sales.

Week Ending November 21st

Shooting its way to the top of the software chart this week was the first of two releases that Call of Duty: Black Ops will see in Japan.  This subtitled version sold just shy of 129k copies and will be followed during December by a dubbed release.  Winning Eleven 2011 completed its set of console releases appearing on the PSP (#6, 35.5k) PS2 (#16, 14.5k) and Wii (#20, 8.1k).

In the week Kinect launched in Japan selling a handful of units and failing to make an impression on the software chart the hardware star was the PSP-3000, more than doubling its previous week’s sales to reach 96.6k.  With no big new PSP game releasing this week the jump in sales was presumably a reaction to last week’s Tactics Ogre and impending release of the next instalment in the little-known Monster Hunter franchise.  In contrast, sales of the PSPgo continued to slide.

Week Ending November 28th

Japan was clearly as eager to get its hands on Gran Turismo 5 as the rest of us with gamers buying 430,707 copies of the long-awaited racer.  The PS3 saw a coincident rise in sales to 68.8k more than doubling its total from the previous week.  A good number of those new PS3s were likely the shiny blue version included in the GT5 Racing Pack.

New entries for Nintendo consoles filled out the rest of the top three in the software chart.  Super Robot Taisen L for the DS took second with 129k sales and the lure of seeing Princess Peach in her beachwear helping Mario Sports Mix to third selling just under 85k copies.

The PSP-3000 saw another strong week of sales, with no corresponding software release, taking top spot in the hardware chart ahead of the PS3 with 75.6k sales.  As I am writing this Monster Hunter Portable 3rd launched a couple of days ago on the 1st December and I can only guess at the chaos that is currently gripping Japan and what effect the custom Monster Hunter PSP will have had on PSP hardware sales.

The Monthly Console and Corporate Fights

Across the month the PS3 beat the Wii (142,536 vs. 119,947), the PSPs beat the DSs (256,292 vs. 176,866) and the PSPgo kept the the PS2 in last place among the Sony consoles (9,136 vs. 5,280).

Overall shares of the month’s hardware unit sales see Sony with a considerable lead over Nintendo.  Out of the 717,168 consoles sold Sony accounted for 56.3% (404,108), Nintendo 41.4% (296,813) and Microsoft 2.3% (16,247).

Finally, for those who find graphs too confusing:

Source: Media Create