Japanese Hardware Race Tight In Post-New Year Week

Market research firm Media Create has revealed data for weekly hardware sales in Japan for the week ending January 13th, following details of the software top thirty. With the Japanese winter/New Year gift giving season now over hardware sales have seen a large drop, proportional to software. However this has left the rankings for the top three selling consoles extremely close – with the Nintendo DS only narrowly beating the PSP. Nintendo DS sales were down almost 170,000 units to 97,369. This compares to a drop of 122,000 for the PSP to 96,159. As usual, the performance of PSP hardware sales in Japanese is almost completely independent of software sales. With only two titles in the top thirty, the console does not appear to be being used primarily to play retail games in Japan. Wii sales were down by 123,000 units to a total of 84,530 for the week. PlayStation 3 sales dropped by 25,000 units to 38,907 and PlayStation 2 sales more than halved to 14,499. Finally, the Xbox 360 saw sales figures drop by 5,000 units to 4,690.