Japanese Sales Charts, Week Ending December 5th

The launch of the Nintendo DS has had a marked effect on the Japanese sales charts, with six titles in the top ten, and a total domination of hardware sales. Even so, Square Enix's PlayStation 2 RPG Dragon Quest VIII has remained on top – although it has now fallen behind the performance of Dragon Quest VII, with 476,281 units sold this week, compared to 1,143,000 for the second week of its predecessor. It is not clear whether the launch of the Nintendo DS has impacted on sales of Dragon Quest VIII, but total sales in the top 100 were down 51 percent on last week. Despite a low attach rate for the DS hardware of just 1.04 piece of software per hardware unit sold, Super Mario 64 DS sold 151,373 units, and second placed Sawaru Made in Wario (aka Wario Ware Touched!) sold 148,825. These figures dropped to 56,337 for Pokémon Dash, and 25,415 for Chokkan Hitofude (aka One-Line Puzzle). As previously reported, launch figures for the Nintendo DS were only slightly behind the Game Boy Advance, with 468,883 units versus 531,298. However, using Nintendo’s figure of 510,000 DS units sold, which includes pre-orders which have not yet been collected, the results are almost identical. 89 percent of current stock of the hardware was sold in the first week, which caused some stores to run out. In terms of market share, the Nintendo DS accounted for 78.54 percent of hardware sales during the week in question, with the PlayStation 2 at 15.72 percent, the Game Boy Advance at 4.71 percent, the GameCube at 0.92 percent and the Xbox at 0.10 percent.

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