Japanese Sales Charts, Week Ending June 26th

A large number of new releases have re-invigorated the Japanese game software market, after somewhat of a fallow period. Overall sales were up almost 50 percent on preceding weeks, although still a little below the weekly average. Nonetheless, Sega’s The King of Beetle MushiKing dominated sales, with a total of 208,400 units sold in its first week. The Game Boy Advance title is a version of the popular arcade and trading card hit which sees rival rhinoceros beetles battling each other. The series is extremely popular with Japanese children, and has spawned an extremely profitable merchandising market for Sega. As the second-ranked title, DS Training For Adults once again showed an unusual amount of longevity for a game in the Japanese market, with 31,843 sales, while Koei’s role-playing game remake Zill O'll Infinite has also sold in relatively reasonable numbers, with 30,536 sales. Bandai’s Shigeru Miamoto-aided Chibi Robo has also performed surprisingly well for a third party GameCube title, with 28,832 sales. Coded Arms represents the first PSP title in the Japanese top ten for two weeks, with sales of 14,138. Surprisingly, the first person shoot ‘em-up – never a popular genre in Japan – managed to outsell Nintendo’s Advance Wars: Dual Strike at number nine, which could claim only 11,930 sales. Although the series has not been popular in Japan since the SNES days (the release of the Game Boy Advance iterations was inexplicably delayed until last November) it still represents a rare failure for a new title on the Nintendo DS, with Konami’s DS Ganbare Goemon: Toukai Douchuu (aka Mystical Ninja) fairing even worse at number eleven. In hardware sales, though, Sony has suffered slower sales for the PSP again - in fact, the console was outsold by the Game Boy Advance SP for the first time this week. Overall, the Nintendo DS was the most popular console this week with a market share of 30.54 percent and 32,789 sales, followed by the PlayStation 2 with a 26.56 percent share and 28,515 sales. Boosted by the success of The King of Beetle MushiKing Game Boy Advance sales rose to 20.82 percent of the market, representing 22,356 sales – this compares to a 19.43 percent market share and 20,862 sales for the PSP. The GameCube had a market share of 2.47 percent, and the Xbox 0.17 percent.

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