Japanese Sales Charts, Week Ending January 9th

This week's Japanese sales chart has begun to enter the same post-Christmas stupor as the rest of the world, with only four new titles in the top 100, and just one in the top ten. The first week of January is normally the middle of the busiest gift giving period in Japan, but this year, the manner in which the days have fallen in the calendar has seen the sales period end early. As a result, sales dropped by 56 percent and are only a little above the weekly average. Nevertheless, Namco’s latest in the Tales of role-playing game series, this time for the Game Boy Advance, has achieved very robust sales of 81,045, just below Gran Turismo 4, still topping the charts with 145,027 sales. Despite the slowdown in software sales, the hardware market is still moving at more than twice the weekly average, buoyed by the release of the Nintendo DS and Sony's PSP. For the first time in a month, though, the PlayStation 2 has bounced back as the best selling console, with 124,401 units sold and a 32.02 percent market share. This was followed by the Nintendo DS with a 27.95 percent market share, the Game Boy Advance with 18.68 percent, the PSP at 15.97 percent, the GameCube at 5.07 percent and the Xbox at 0.30 percent. With the PSP still failing to outsell the Game Boy Advance, and the highest ranked PSP game (Hot Shots Golf) at just number nineteen, the console has still yet to make a serious impact on the Japanese market. This is continually put down to stock shortages, but with that situation allegedly improving, it is notable that there has not yet been a major chart-affecting increase in either market share or software sales.

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