Resident Evil 4 leads January U.S. Sales

Resident Evil 4 seems to have survived the sales apathy that greeted its release in Japan, as Capcom’s acclaimed, currently GameCube-exclusive sequel tops the U.S. console sales charts for January 2005, with over 300,000 sales. The second highest selling title was Rockstar's PlayStation 2 title Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas with a little under 250,000 units sold, followed by a strong performance by Game Boy Advance ARPG The Legend of Zelda: The Minish Cap, with just under 220,000 units. Combined sales of LucasArts’ 'military GTA'-styled Mercenaries would actually have put it above Resident Evil 4, but as it stands, the Xbox version was at number four with over 200,000 sales, and the PS2 version at number five with over 180,000 sales. The rest of the chart was made up of pre-Christmas titles with Need for Speed: Underground 2 (PS2) at number six, Madden NFL 2005 (PS2) at number seven, Halo 2 (Xbox) at number eight, Kingdom Hearts: Chain of Memories (GBA) at number nine and Super Mario 64 DS at number ten. For the month of January overall, sales were flat, with home console games sales decreasing by six percent and portable games sales increasing by 41 percent, in part due to the success of the Nintendo DS. A small increase in hardware sales was predicted, but its failure to appear is unlikely to be seen as a serious problem.