PS Vita's Japanese sales continue to slide as consumers wait for games

PS Vita's struggle to gain traction in Japan continues as the portable's weekly hardware sales sink even further, with its titles still notably absent from the country's top 20 retail software chart. Sony's new handheld is already tracking behind early sales for PSP and 3DS at this point in its life, due in part to what some believe was a lacking launch lineup. PS Vita fell below 20,000 units sold for the first time two weeks ago, but now its numbers threaten to drop past the 15,000 mark. As consumers wait for more system-selling games to arrive for PS Vita, the highest profile releases planned in the near future are this week's Tales of Innocence R, a Namco Bandai port of a 2007 DS RPG; and in two weeks Sony's own Gravity Rush, a new, unproven IP. Nintendo 3DS, though selling a fifth less hardware than last week, still remains relatively strong after pushing over 80,000 units, more than all other consoles combined. PlayStation 3 sales (and sales for all other systems) also fell, moving around 21,000 units. PSP outperformed its successor for the fifth week straight, selling more than 17,000 handhelds. Wii sold 10,000 consoles last week, while the Nintendo DSi family, Xbox 360, and PlayStation 2 remained at around the same numbers as the previous week's. Below are the full sales rankings provided by Media Create and translated by NeoGAF for the week ending January 22, 2012 (The second chart lumps together sales of all models in a given line of hardware):

New software releases last week include Sega's 3DS rhythm game Rhythm Thief and the Emperor's Treasure, D3 Publisher's Xbox 360 action title Onechanbara Z: Kagura, Namco Bandai's PSP RPG Heroes Phantasia, and Konami's 3DS RPG Beyond the Labyrinth. 3DS titles continue to dominate the upper half of the top 20 software sales at retail chart thanks to Capcom's Monster Hunter 3G, Nintendo's Mario Kart 7 and Super Mario 3D Land, Level-5's Inazuma Eleven Go: Shine / Dark, and the aforementioned new releases. In the bottom half, many of Nintendo's evergreen Wii games populate the list, but its new release this week, Kiki Trick, an audio-themed minigame collection from the team behind the Rhythm Heaven and WarioWare series, is noticeably missing from the top 20. The complete top 20 chart, as supplied by Media Create is shown below:

Looking forward, this week's big releases in Japan include Capcom's BioHazard: Revelations (or Resident Evil: Revelations in the West) for 3DS, Namco Bandai's Tales of Innocence R for PS Vita, and Sega/From Software's Armored Core V for Xbox 360 and PS3.