Nintendo’s 3DS continues to dominate the top of the charts while Sony must be wondering why fewer and fewer people in Japan are picking up a PlayStation Vita.
The weekly Japanese hardware sales charts are in and instead of going about our usual format we decided to change things up a bit in honour of the PlayStation Vita and its alarming sales trend over the past few weeks.
While the Vita still has not suffered the indignity of selling less than Microsoft’s Xbox 360 in the region, which is where the benchmark for really poor sales begins in the region, its sales figure have been dropping at a slightly more than concerning rate.
The 3DS continues to dominate with 100,668-units sold in the previous week, and although that is less than half what the 3D enable portable gaming device sold in the week before that, it still reigns supreme.
In fact, the trend continued for all the platforms as the PlayStation 3 also sold less than half its prior week’s sales figures of 74,459-units (selling only 30,332-units) and even the PlayStation Portable managed to outsell Sony’s latest portable console.
The PSP raked in an impressive figure of 22,538-units sold in seven days which was over 4,000-units more than the Vita’s rather poor 18,361-units sold.
What is even more alarming is the huge dip in the figure as the Vita sold 42,915-units in the week before, which means the sales dropped by over 50%.
Sony do not seem too concerned at this point in time and are surely hoping that when the Vita is released in other regions and more software is made available, the sales figures will pick up; same as the Nintendo 3DS’s did after its respective slow start.
Many are hoping for a price cut in the near future and that could have something to do with the poor figures, yet that seems unlikely as Sony usually take their time before announcing such moves.
The Vita’s European release is not that far off and excitement is steadily building up for its release, especially in the United Kingdom and everyone will have to wait and see if the market there is more receptive of the Vita.
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