PS3 Sales Double In Weekly Japanese Hardware Charts

Market research firm Media Create has revealed data for weekly hardware sales in Japan for the week ending July 29th, following details of the software top thirty. With the top ten including representations from all the major formats this week, hardware sales saw some notable increases on the previous seven days for the PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360. However, the Nintendo DS is still far out in front of the pack, even though the console actually sold 4,000 less units than the previous week for a total of 150,584. The supply constrained Wii also saw a drop in sales of nearly 10,000 units, to a total of 77,169. This still left it comfortably ahead of the third best seller of the week, even though the PSP saw sales increase by over 2,000 units to 35,068. For the first time in many months, the PlayStation 3 outsold its predecessor with sales more than doubling from last week’s total of 12,187 to 28,829 units this week. The increase is attributable to the release of Hot Shots Golf 5, although whether it is sustainable will be keenly watched by the whole Japanese games industry. The PlayStation 2 recorded a particularly poor week, with sales falling by over 2,000 units to a total of just 11,757. It was still well ahead of the Xbox 360 though, which saw an increase of only 1,200 units to 3,872 – despite the top ten success of The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion. The Game Boy Advance family of consoles saw sales rise slightly to 532 units, while the GameCube dropped by a few dozen units to 102.