Japan: the weekly hardware sales charts are in and it seems Sony has more reason to consider a price cut as the Vita’s sales fell to a new record low while the 3DS saw sales shoot up by over 20,000 units.
Sony had everyone’s undivided attention when they unveiled the PlayStation Vita at last year’s Electronic Entertainment Expo. The technology and power that the consumer electronics giant had packed into the Vita impressed everyone and many were surprised
at the price points that Sony had slapped onto the console.
Since then the Vita drew more interest than ever and recorded an impressive opening week of sales in Japan. After that however, the celebrity status of the console began to wane a little as sales began dropping drastically.
The Vita went from six figure sales to five figures and for the past couple of weeks is struggling in the four figure regions. Sony’s second generation portable gaming console recorded its lowest ever figures in the region the week before, yet between April
16 to April 22, the Vita broke that record by selling 44 units less than it did previously.
The Vita is barely outselling the Nintendo Wii, which sold a total of 7,025 units last week, and is well behind PlayStation Portable sales as well (11,779). In fact, the figure of 8,206 units sold over the past seven days is the lowest figure ever recorded
for the console.
On the flip side of the equation, the Nintendo 3DS, which one could term as the Vita’s closest competitor, sold more than 20,000 units than it did last week. The 3DS is miles ahead of the rest of the hardware when it comes to sales having sold an impressive
84,760 units in the past seven days.
Sony PlayStation 3 and PlayStation Portable ended the week in second and third place in the charts with 16,390 and 11,779 units sold respectively.
While analysts are pointing at a lack of fresh content for the console as the reason for the dropping sales as well the need for the drop in price, Sony only seem to be focused on the content aspect of the console and are set to release a number of new titles
over the course of the next few weeks.
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