Japanese Sales Charts, Week Ending May 29th

Following a relatively slow period of sales, the Japanese video game market is showing definite signs of recovery, with sales this week up 75 percent, to 87 percent of the weekly average. Since much of the problems in previous weeks has been a lack of prominent new titles, the large number of new releases this week shows that Japan is just as prone to poor scheduling as the U.K. and other countries. Namco X Capcom, Berwick Saga, SD Gundam G Generation DS and Hanjuku Hero IV are all relatively prominent role-playing titles, and analysts suggest that they may have eaten into each other’s potential markets. As such, the sales for each title are more evenly distributed across the top ten than is usual. Nonetheless, this week's leading title, the PlayStation 2 strategy RPG 'team-up' title Namco X Capcom, tops the charts with 87,223 units sold. Rival Berwick Saga was just behind with 84,625 copies sold, while SD Gundam G Generation DS reported 53,484 unit sales. Although it has dropped two positions in the chart, budget priced exercise program DS Training For Adults: Work Your Brain actually sold more units than last week, at 47,861 copies. This underlines another good week for the DS, which is once again the best-selling hardware, and also has six software titles in the software top twenty. The PSP's highest ranked title is new puzzle game entry Intelligent License at number twenty-two – the worst overall showing yet for PSP titles in the Japanese sales charts. Sony will also be looking at the handheld hardware sales figures carefully, since the Nintendo DS has finally overtaken the PSP’s total sales to date this year – thereby increasing the gap between the two machine’s Japanese installed userbase to over one million. Lifetime to date sales for the Nintendo DS in Japan now stand at 2,400,094, compared to 1,374,443 for the PSP. Hardware sales figures for this week alone gave the Nintendo DS a market share of 36.13 percent, with 39,687 units sold, with the PlayStation 2 at 32.00 percent and 35,143 units, and the PSP at 20.03 percent and 21,996 units sold. The Game Boy Advance had a 9.41 percent market share, with the GameCube at 2.29 percent and the Xbox at 0.15 percent.

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