The handheld portable gaming device reaches five million units sold in 52 weeks, beating out the Nintendo DS and the Game Boy Advance.
2011 was a record breaking year for the video game industry with nearly every publisher setting some kind of record within those 365 days.
EA announced that FIFA 12 had become the best-selling sports title of all time and that Battlefield 3 was the publisher’s fast-selling title in history.
Assassin’s Creed: Revelations gave Ubisoft a reason to celebrate as the game sold better than all of its predecessors combined.
Rovio also found plenty of joy in the fact that Angry Birds reached the 500-million downloads mark last year.
Of course there was also Activision’s Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 as the game went on to become the fastest-selling entertainment product in history as it beat of the Hollywood epic, Avatar. The game made $775-million in five days and its publisher posted
profits of over $1.09-billion for the fiscal year as well.
However, Nintendo were not enjoying 2011 as much as they would have wanted to as the company was going through a torrid time with the Nintendo 3DS. Sales figures were below average and the company made a number of changes in order to change that.
A huge price cut saw the prices of the 3DS consoles drastically reduced but that was not enough as the company had to reforecast its expected revenue and sales figures. A number of top executives at Nintendo also halved their salaries in order to help keep
the company for being financially devastated.
However, the move seems to have paid off as the 3DS has been the best-selling console in Japan for the past few months. Not even the launch of Sony’s PlayStation Vita could knock it off the top spot of the hardware sales charts where it sold over a 100,000
units per week on average.
It now turns out that the console has broken a record of its own, as the 3DS has become the fastest selling console in Japan’s history as it sold 5-million units in 52 weeks!
That broke the previous record of selling 5-million units by four weeks, as its predecessor, the DS, took 56 weeks to reach the same figure.
However, analysts are stating that the strong sales trend can only continue if there is strong support for the console in terms of software.
Resident Evil Revelations has helped sell a large number of the consoles as has a new entry in the long running Mario series. Nintendo has many more titles lined up for the future, including yet another game based on the Italian plumber.
Yet, at the end of the day, Nintendo are still trying to recover the losses from the disastrous launch of the 3DS but if sales continue the way they are then that should not be a problem.
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