Land of the Rising Sony

Sony took the honours for both home console and handheld sales in Japan last month. Trying something different this month we have separated sales for home consoles and handhelds which means the part of the graphs occupied by the 360 and PSPgo is less cluttered.  Just for fun we also take a look at shares of the corporate pie.

Home Consoles

As far as Japanese home console sales were concerned, March was a game of two halves.  Fairly run-of-the-mill for the first two weeks but then two big software releases for the PS3 saw it take a comfortable lead over the Wii.  Releasing first during the week ending 21st March was Yakuza 4, selling 384,000 copies and propelling the PS3 to the top of the weekly chart just as Yakuza 3 did a little over a year ago.  That week also saw the release of Torne, Japan’s version of PlayTV, which achieved sales of 66,000.

Then last week saw the release of Fist of the North Star, which just pipped Yakuza 4’s first week sales by selling 385,000 copies on PS3 which helped Sony’s console sell another 50,000.  Fist of the North Star is a cross-platform title and saw a simultaneous release on the 360, selling just 30,ooo copies, giving the PS3 version almost a 13:1 unit sales win.  Yakuza 4 held on to second spot in the software chart last week with sales of 83,000.

Over the month as a whole, Sony sold almost 156,000 PS3s while Nintendo saw just over 133,000 Wiis manage somehow to find homes in Japan, where there cannot be too many households without one by now.

Handhelds

The PSP had a strong start to the month with the release of .hack//Link giving its sales a nice boost over those during the final week in February.  March has been a quiet month for software releases for the handheld consoles though they all saw a rise in sales last week.  For the PSPgo that end of the month bump was enough to see it outsell the PS2 for the first time this year, if only by a mere 89 consoles.  Still, not being Sony’s worst selling console in Japan for a week has got to be good news, right?

Thanks to the PSP’s commanding sales lead in that first week, combined PSP sales (though the PSPgo isn’t really helping much) were higher than those for the three DS models with Sony’s portables selling a total of 194,230 units compared to Nintendo’s 166,582.

Though Nintendo will not be too disheartened as the DS recently passed the 30 million sales mark in Japan according to Enterbrain’s figures.  The three best-selling games on the DS so far are New Super Mario Bros. (5,767,262 units), Pokemon Diamond & Pearl (5,766,571) and Animal Crossing (5,133,862).

Shares of the Pie

As you will have worked out by now having read the rest of the article, of the three console makers Sony was the overall winner in March in terms of units sales, with a 53.5% share.  Nintendo took a 45% share leaving the remaining 1.5% for Microsoft.

Finally, here are the raw numbers if you like that sort of thing.

Source: Media Create