UK Sales Chart, Week Ending March 12th

The UK industry’s penchant for release date bottlenecks has come to the fore yet again, with an extremely busy week dominated by the release of Gran Turismo 4 and the launch of the Nintendo DS. As previously reported Gran Turismo 4 has broken first day sales records in Europe, with 3,182,535 units shipped across all PAL territories (primarily Europe and Australasia), and over 250,000 units sold in the UK alone. The lack of online play seems to have had little effect on the UK, where such features are not generally regarded as important, and these first-week sales have almost equaled the first-week sales of the first three games in the series combined. The biggest multiformat release of the week is urban soccer simulation FIFA Street, which seems to have replicated the success of the likes of NBA Street in North America. Although the European launch of the Nintendo DS is discussed in general elsewhere on Gamasutra, it is surprising just how successful it has been in the UK. Counting multiformat releases such as Spider-Man 2 and The Urbz there are a grand total of twelve DS titles in the top forty – an extremely impressive feat out of a launch line-up of sixteen. It is interesting to note how much this mirrors the success of the Australian launch, a country which, together with the UK is traditionally viewed as one of Nintendo's weakest worldwide. This alone lends some credence to Nintendo's suggestion that the DS is able to attract a different type of customer. The most successful title has been Super Mario 64 DS, with attach rates as high as 50 percent reported by some retailers. Wario Ware Touched! has also performed extremely strongly, as has Ubisoft’s Rayman DS. The only notable failure has been Namco’s Mr Driller: Drill Spirits, with the lack of a UK specific office for the Japanese publisher meaning that it has received little in the way of marketing support.

Official UK Leisure Software Charts (c) ELSPA compiled by Chart-Track