Japanese Sales Charts, Week Ending October 29th

The Japanese games market has suffered another unsteady week of sales, with only a 6 percent improvement on last week’s figures, leaving overall sales just 56 percent of the weekly average. Ace Combat 5 was the only major performer this week, although it sold less than the 210,000 first week sales of its immediate predecessor, three years ago. If the 173,000 unit sales of Ace Combat 5 are ignored, then this week's Japanese sales would actually have been worse than last week. In fact, the 100th-placed title on Media Create's chart sold as little as 700 units. The worry now is that, if sales do not pick up in the busier months of November and December, than the talk of a recovery in the Japanese market may not be as fully fledged as some thought. In hardware terms, the status quo in effect for the last month or so is continuing, with the Game Boy Advance enjoying a 55.72 percent market share, the PlayStation 2 36.22 percent, the GameCube 7.40 percent and the Xbox just 0.48 percent. As noted previously, if pre-orders are included in these figures, then the unreleased Nintendo DS would actually be the third ranked format, followed by the newly redesigned PlayStation 2. Now that the PSP price has been annouced in Japan, all eyes will be on its performance in terms of numbers of pre-orders.

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