Japanese Sales Charts, Week Ending October 10th

After a downturn in sales last week, there is new reason for optimism in the Japanese games market. Sales of the top 100 titles reached 767,099 units – 7.8% more than last week. The average weekly sales volume in October of last year was just 532,568 units. Sales were led by a number of high-profile new releases, with Bandai’s new Mobile Suit Gundam Seed title leading the pack, selling 94,130 units in just its first day. This was followed by Nintendo’s latest entry in the Fire Emblem series, which sold more than 150,000 copies in its first week. The peculiarly titled Berserk: Millennium Falcon (which may attract the attention of LucasFilm lawyers when they hear about it) sold approximately 51,000 units, and the anime-based Space Battleship Yamato sold about 22,000 units. The Game Boy Advance still dominates hardware sales -- it had a 54% market share -- and it's likely to continue to continue its domination until the newly designed PlayStation 2 console is released. The the old design had a 37.5% share of the week’s hardware sales, followed by the GameCube at 7.9% and the Xbox at 0.3%.

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