Japanese Sales Charts, Week Ending January 16th

The PSP has achieved an important feat in this week Japanese sales charts, in outselling the Nintendo DS for the first time. The PSP gained 30.64 of the market this week, only fractionally below the PlayStation 2 at 31.23 percent, and well ahead of the Nintendo DS at 25.39 percent. The Game Boy Advance market share was reduced to 8.95 percent, the GameCube to 3.55 percent and the Xbox to 0.24 percent. However, in the post-Christmas and New Year season, actual numbers of sales were well down, with the PSP selling just 64,602 units, compared to 53,527 for the Nintendo DS. Even so, it should be possible, in a month or so, to begin to directly compare the successes of the two consoles in Japan. As of now, Sony have sold 597,831 units of the PSP, while Nintendo have sold in excess of 1.5 million units of the DS in Japan. In the software sales chart, the increased availability of the PSP is also evident, with Minna no Golf Portable (aka Hot Shots Golf Portable) proving the most popular PSP title, next to Shin Sangoku Musou (aka Dynasty Warriors). However, with sales of just 18,682 and 17,070 respectively, their impression on the chart is not marked. In the end, it is the new Game Boy Advance version of Mario Party which dominates the charts, going straight in at number one with 67,927 sales. The only other new entry is From Software’s samurai adventure The Story of Hero Yoshitsune, with 41,927 sales.

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