Virtua Fighter For PS3 Grabs Top Spot In Japanese Charts

The PlayStation 3 has achieved its first number one in the Japanese sales charts, with Sega’s Virtua Fighter 5 entering straight in at number one with over 48,000 unit sales. However, the result has been achieved in what is overall the slowest week of sales in Japan so far this year - and for most of 2006. Virtua Fighter 5, the first PlayStation 3 title to enter the top ten since the console’s launch week in November, has also fallen well short of the 100,000 unit minimum usually expected by Japanese analysts for any number one selling title. More worryingly for Sony, the release of the game appears to have had only a minimal effect on hardware sales. The only other new entry in the top ten is Marvelous’ turn-based strategy title Luminous Arc for DS at number nine, with over 25,000 unit sales. Once again, Nintendo formats have dominated the top thirty, in which only four of the titles were not created for the Nintendo DS, Wii or Game Boy Advance – and the majority of those published by Nintendo themselves. The highest ranked PSP title is again Monster Hunter Portable 2 at number twenty-two, while there were no Xbox 360 titles in the top fifty. Despite the marked drop in software sales, hardware sales were actually significantly up on the previous week, with the Nintendo DS selling a total of 201,298 units, up by over 55,000. The Wii rose to 78,550 units sold and the PSP was up to 32,175 units. PlayStation 3 sales rose from 17,727 to 23,431 units - although what effect the release of Virtua Fighter 5 had on these figures, compared to the existing upward trend for the week, is unclear. PlayStation 2 sales fell to 16,033, with the Xbox 360 also down from 6,130 units the previous week to just 4,811 units. The Game Boy Advance family of consoles sold 1,900 units and the GameCube 383.

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