Japanese Sales Charts, Week Ending January 23rd

The Japanese market has avoided going into freefall with the end of the New Year’s gift giving season. This week's chart features almost exactly the same number of sales as last week, with a total of only 20 percent less than the weekly average. The market was led by Capcom's online-enabled PS2 title Monster Hunter G, with an impressive 127,846 units sold – a particularly good result, considering the title is only a relatively minor upgrade to the original and not a full sequel. Genki's samurai action title Fuun Bakumatsuden, by comparison, did rather worse than expected with only 51,880 sales, compared to first week sales of approximately 129,000 for its predecessor Fuun Shinsengumi. The biggest news of the week though is undoubtedly the continued, creeping success of the PSP, which this week beat both the Nintendo DS and PlayStation 2 to become the best-selling games hardware. This is the first time the PSP has managed such a feat, with 66,543 units sold – compared to 56,374 for the PlayStation 2 and 44,608 for the Nintendo DS. This gave the PSP a market share of 35.58 percent, the PlayStation 2 30.14 percent, the Nintendo DS 23.85 percent, the Game Boy Advance 7.30 percent, the GameCube 2.87 percent and the Xbox 0.27 percent.

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