Japanese Hardware: DSi Still Leads As Sales Fall

With the Japanese New Year gift-giving season now over, hardware sales have expectedly fallen this week. Not helped by a second week without any new entries in the software charts, sales were down across the board. The hierarchy of best-selling platforms remained unchanged, though, with the Nintendo DS still leading the pack with 101,630 units, 78,201 of which were the newer DSi model and 23,429 the older DS Lite. However, this week's sales are more than half that of the previous week. Most of the other platforms also saw their sales slashed by over a half, with the PSP down to 60,495 units for the week. Sony’s handheld was able to maintain its lead over the Wii though, which saw sales drop by a third to 41,243 units. The PlayStation 3 was down to 28,144 units in fourth place, while the Xbox 360 actually fell slightly less than half of the previous week’s total -– down to 10,554 units. The PlayStation 2 fell by a similar proportion to 6,628 units. Overall in the software top 50, there were 23 titles for the Nintendo DS, 13 for the Wii, seven for the PSP, five for the PlayStation 3, two for the PlayStation 2, and, for the third week running, none for the Xbox 360.