PS Vita sales surge in Japan thanks to Sega rhythm game

The PS Vita just had one of its best sales week in Japan thanks to Sega's new rhythm game for a popular virtual character, which helped nearly quintuple hardware sales for the ailing handheld. Hatsune Miku: Project Diva F was the top-selling game in Japan last week and moved almost 160,000 copies at retail, the biggest opening week debut for any PS Vita title ever. Atlus' Persona 4: The Golden previously held that record with over 137,000 units sold. The Sega game released with a hardware bundle, which helped boost PS Vita system sales to a little over 50,000, about five times its sales in the previous week. No other PS Vita titles pushed enough copies last week to appear on Media Create's top 20 software sales chart. Major PS Vita releases have managed to temporarily multiply the system's otherwise bleak weekly sales in the country before, such as Persona 4: The Golden and Metal Gear Solid HD Edition, but those numbers immediately returned to their usual lows of around 10,000 units the following week. Though companies rarely provide digital sales figures for PS Vita titles, a spokesperson for the series disclosed that Hatsune Miku's downloadable version sold about 10 percent as much as the retail release (16,000 copies), according to a report from Andriasang. That spokesperson, however, also mentioned that based on current sales trends for the game, it would be difficult to create a sequel due to Hatsune Miku's high development costs. While they never released in the U.S., the Hatsune Miku games were some of the most popular on PSP in Japan.