Japanese Sales Charts, Week Ending December 26th

With the major gift-giving season about to begin in Japan, sales have reached a peak, with sales of the top 100 software titles totaling 2,801,486 units this week. Interestingly, the sales have been led by some slightly older titles, particularly those from Nintendo. The Kyoto-based giant has seen all of its primary franchises do well, with five titles in the top ten and only three games in the top ten not on a Nintendo format. The top selling title of the week, though, was Dragon Quest & Final Fantasy in Itadaki Street Special – a Mario Party style game including characters from both the Dragon Quest and Final Fantasy series - which sold 201,005 units (more than the approximately 161,000 units of its predecessor in its first week). For the first time in a long while, no game in the top ten sold less than 100,000 units, with Super Mario 64 DS shifting 150,550 units, Mario Party 6 138,124 and Yoshi Universal Gravitation 112,663. Nintendo’s success is also reflected in hardware sales, with the GameCube actually managing to outsell the still difficult-to-source PSP. The best selling console of the week was again the Nintendo DS with 396,674 units sold for a market share of 39.85 percent. The Game Boy Advance followed with a 19.51 percent share, then the PlayStation 2 at 18.90 percent, the GameCube at 10.88 percent, the PSP at 10.77 percent and the Xbox at 0.07 percent. If all three Nintendo formats are combined, that means the company had a colossal 70.24 percent of the hardware market during Japan’s busiest retail week. All the more impressive because this week saw record-breaking sales of approximately 1 million consoles. Once again, though, no permanent conclusions can be drawn from this until the PSP recovers from its initial stock shortages.

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