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Another week in Japan: Hardware and software numbers 12/10-12/16
Be careful with that DS of yours. It may be small and look all cute with its two screens, but that thing is a monster. How else could a system manage an 89,000 boost in hardware sales from last week's already ridiculously high numbers? The DS just continues to blow everything else away, selling 91,000 units more than the competing PSP (which also had a good week in Japan). As for software sales, however, only three of the system's biggest contenders (Mario Party DS, Professor Layton II, and Dragon Quest IV) managed to make it into the top ten. Not only did these three games do well for the week, but their total sales are pretty outstanding. We wouldn't be surprised to see all of them reach the million mark at some point.Check after the break to see Japan's hardware and software numbers for the week of 12/10-12/16.
Wii surpasses Xbox 360 in UK
According to the sales data from Chart-Track (your friendly neighborhood UK chart compiler), the Wii's total hardware sales surpassed those of the Xbox 360 in the land of Great Britain. Wait, the Xbox 360 was on the market for an entire year before the Wii, you say? It ain't no thang. Nothing can keep that little white console down.Chart-Track declined to release the total sales numbers of each console, due to corporate policy. The charts did reveal, however, that 100,000 Wii units were sold in the UK last week. That may not be enough to meet demand, but still shows that Nintendo is supplying a good amount of consoles to the region.[Via Gamasutra]
Game sales by region: who printed which demonimation of money?
We know that Nintendo's games are awesome and all, but we can't help but feel that their constant monopoly on DS game sales must make compiling sales lists dull. "Nintendo ... Nintendo ... another Nintendo." In North America., all five of the top five DS games sold this week are first-party; only one in the UK comes from another publisher. If we had an impish sense of humor (check) and access to near-unlimited funds (dang) we'd go buy 50,000 copies or so of something like Phoenix Wright Ace Attorney: Trials and Tribulations just to mess with the charts. As it stands, in NA and the UK, the big winners are both Brain Ages and Phantom Hourglass. And, we suppose, the people who bought those and can feel like they're on the victorious team.In Japan, a detective game from Tecmo sits at the top spot, followed by Final Fantasy Tactics A2. This report conflicts with the report yesterday that had FFTA2 at the top-- maybe DS Nishimura Kyotaro Suspense sells better on Amazon (from whence the results for this study are tallied) than other retailers. Check after the break for the full top-five lists!
Charting the history of MMO subscriptions
The world of MMOs has been around a lot longer than even I realized, and thanks to Tobold's pointing out MMOData, I was able to look at the history of MMOs, at least as far as their subscriptions were concerned. The data on the site is not exactly up-to-date, but what it gives us is a general idea of the flow of popularity of each of the MMOs. But as a commenter pointed out on Tobold's article on the subject, counting accounts is not really the most accurate determinate of how popular a game is, particularly when you toss free MMOs into the mix. Rather, the data that would better tell us how popular a game is would be the active players information. If you know exactly how many people are playing each of the games during, say, a given week, you would then have a better understanding of how to compare their popularity. Hop on over to MMOData and play with the charts yourself. If nothing else, it's fun to mess with interactive data analysis, even if it's not entirely accurate.
Total Wii sales top 10 million
We were just talking about how the Wii was closing in on the top seller, the Xbox 360. Now, it's so close that the Wii could smell the Xbox 360 like a shark can smell blood in the water. It's closing in with full intent on showing Microsoft's system who's boss. Right now, the Wii is around 220K away from taking the top spot.
Wii Warm Up: Taking the lead
The real sales leader, of course, is the DS (and for good reason!), but when it comes to home consoles, the Xbox 360 is in the lead for this generation. The Wii, however, is creeping up and will soon surpass the current leader, so long as nothing changes. What we want to know is -- how long do you think it'll take? There's a half million and change to go, worldwide. Will it happen before fall is over? By the holidays? And will Wii take the lead and keep it?[Thanks for the idea, Marcus B.!]
Is Wii fever wearing off?
Here in the armchair analyst era, every slight change in sales trends seems to have become reason for panic, or at least in-depth discussion. Thus, when Gamasutra released the above chart as part of their NPD analysis, the rumblings began. Are Wii sales dropping off? Is there some truth in Dave Perry's recent doom-saying about the future of the Wii? Here's our question: can we really discern anything other than current sales numbers from this chart? For a variety of reasons, we'll say no. This sales chart takes only that very thing into account: sales. While it's a great analytical tool for tracking said sales, we would caution anyone from drawing too many conclusions about market trends from hardware sales only. From this, of course, certain things can be extrapolated; US sales of anything and everything tend to drop in the pre-tax day period, but consoles are still riding a holiday wave of demand in January and February. In months when a particular console surges, there was probably a hotly-desired game driving those sales. But all of that is guesswork if we're only working with pure sales numbers -- in order to truly analyze what's going on, we have to look at a variety of factors.
Wii hits an unofficial eight million sold
Start your engines, fanboys. According to vgchartz.com, which is where we go to hang out when we're bored, the Wii just yesterday surpassed eight million units sold since its November 19th launch in North America. That's fast. That's really fast. Check out this graph with the option "align launches" enabled; it's staggering.So, here we go. By the end of year, Nintendo Wii sales will most likely have surpassed the Xbox 360's one-year head start to become the current generation leader, and heck, we might just "win" this thing. Who'd have thought such a turnaround was possible? And why the hell didn't we buy NTDOY stock? Dammit.Bask in the glory, guys. Most likely, one of those eight million is yours.
Super Mario Chart
NeoGAFfer Stumpokapow compiled this chart of Japanese Mario sales throughout the series, and two things are immediately obvious from looking at it: Mario sprites still look great! Seriously, yay Mario. New Super Mario Bros. is huge. We knew that NSMB was riding the combined influence of Nintendo nostalgia and Being On The Nintendo DS into sales Valhalla, but we didn't realize just how successful it was. If Nintendo ever gets enough DS Lites into Japanese stores, we can almost guarantee that two-million copy gap between it and the original Super Mario Bros. will disappear. In other good news (in one blogger's opinion and pretty much no one else's), Super Mario 64 is near the bottom of the list, providing evidence that 3D Mario was a failed experiment. This in no way means that Super Mario RPG's position on the list is indicative of the quality of that game. That's, uh, completely different. Check after the break to see the full chart and to register your disgust about our treatment of Mario 64.
PSP vs DS game price showdown, it's a draw
Don't have a PSP but that recent $30 price cut just put it within your financial grasp? Then we'll not only advise that you look for additional employment, but we'll direct you towards this handy article at Curmudgeon Gamer that addresses some of the tired, specious arguments you may have seen propagated on this here internet. Namely, that the PSP has no games and, what games it does have, require a second mortgage to finance.Some observations: the $50 PSP game is gone (the vaporous Oblivion for PSP notwithstanding), replaced by the much more amenable $40 game; EB Games lists 102 new games for the DS and 94 for the PSP; the average cost of a game on each platform is only off by $2.54; and the median price for each system is a common $29.99. With Sony telling teens to "get their own," convincing the chronically underemployed that PSP games are affordable is more important than ever.The data is available on Curmudgeon Gamer in a variety of formats if anyone cares to remix it ... or make us a more attractive 425 pixel wide chart! Update: Thanks for the chart, Steve![Via PSP Fanboy]
Japanese hardware sales, Feb. 19 - Feb. 25: text adventure edition
You wake up disoriented, in a dark room. You have no idea where you are.>lookIt's a dark room. You can't see anything. We know you're disoriented, but do try to keep up.>look exitsFine. Okay. You stumble around the room until you find a wall. Keeping one hand on the wall, you walk the perimeter of the room, looking for doors. You find a door on the east side of the room. You also find a key hanging from a hook on the wall. And by "find" we mean "get poked by." We hope you find some Neosporin on this adventure.>advise readers to click post break
Release drought? A line graph disagrees!
What's the best way to make the Wii seem even cooler? Compare it to the Nintendo 64! Games Radar decided to get to the bottom of the "release drought" issue by comparing the current Wii library to the libraries of the GameCube and N64 after their first four months. The Wii has the most diverse lineup by far, which would seem to prove, for better or worse, that third parties are participating more this time around.We're kind of surprised the GameCube "launch window" selection was this small, but the N64 numbers look right in line with our impressions. Only, like,four games were ever released for that, and two of them were basically the same 3D Castlevania.
Is this Apple's iWork spreadsheet app?
ThinkSecret has unearthed what appears to be a screenshot of the oft-rumoured forthcoming spreadsheet application expected to ship with a future version of iWork -- either the app is still very early in development, or Apple plans to take its minimalist design ethic to new heights (lows?) with this anti-Excel app. Internally referred to as Lasso, the spreadsheet is expected to be named Numbers or Charts, offer Excel import/export, templates for typical personal and business finance, sales, and marketing, and 200+ spreadsheet functions to help those business types stick it to Microsoft -- but from the looks of the above screenshot, don't be throwing away your copies of Office just yet. [Via TUAW]Update: That screenshot is looking pretty fake, after all.
Japanese sales chart, Dec 18-24: long time no see
It's been a long time since the last time we've been able to write up one of these reports. Why? These Japanese charts haven't been too friendly to PSP fanboys...Thankfully, Metal Gear Solid: Portable Ops has changed all of that, resulting in quite an impressive showing for the PSP last week in Japan. Let's take a look at the numbers:1. Pokémon Diamond (DS) - 209,379 / 2,329,2272. Metal Gear Solid : Portable Ops (PSP) - 178,370 / *NEW*3. Pokémon Pearl (DS) - 164,670 / 1,931,4454. New Super Mario Bros. (DS) - 154,107 / 3,771,128)5. Wii Sports (Wii) - 152,756 / 471,229)The PSP also sold an impressive amount of hardware. Sure, not as much as either the DS or the Wii, but isn't that expected by now? The PSP represents the strongest part of Sony's three-pillar strategy:1. DS Lite: 485,584 165,876 (51.88%)2. Wii: 279,277 171,040 (158.02%)3. PSP: 138,588 89,626 (183.05%)4. PS3: 76,882 5,940 (8.37%)5. PS2: 46,209 8,479 (22.47%)Look at that surge of demand for PSP. It shows you that as long as interesting software continues to come out on our beloved handheld, gamers will rush out and buy it.[Via Jeux-France]
Three million units sold?
VGCharts, the "premier source for videogame sales charts on the internet", has totaled worldwide Wii sales now in excess of three million units. The same list has Xbox 360 at 7.74 million, and the PS3 at a rather stunted 1.18 million. By comparison, other-unofficial-internet-tallying site NexGenWars has the three consoles at 9.18 million for the 360, only 2 million for the Wii, and 800,000 for the PS3.Which should you believe? We're inclined to roll with VGCharts, which seems to have a very meticulous method of gathering numerical data. The competition uses an arbitrary "unit sold every x seconds" formula until the site owner can alter the data manually after press releases and official data; in the first week of sales, the Wii inexplicably went from 700,000 to 400,000 in the blink of an eye.We all know that Nintendo promised four million worldwide by year's end, but over 75% delivered isn't such a terrible let-down. And hey! There are still five days left! C'mon, Nintendo, you can do it![Thanks, Richard!]
Microsoft copied the only iPod they could
John Gruber has penned an interesting observation of how Microsoft might very well have missed the mark from the get-go when they made the strange decision to take on the iPod and iTunes. Since the player's initial wiz-bang sales period is essentially over (as in: it more or less set a decent sales barometer, at least for now), John wrangles some interesting statistics from Amazon's charts on exactly where the Zune stands in comparison to Apple's players (including year-old models), as well as its ranking in the overall electronics category. To spoil the surprise: the Zune isn't doing so well. We've looked at Amazon's charts before, but as of this writing, a record player is beating out the best selling Zune on the electronics list, while iPods - specifically the small, flash-based nano and shuffle - dominate most of the top 10 spots.John then uses this data and good ol' fashioned people watching to conclude that Microsoft shouldn't have taken what could be their only swing at the plate in producing a hard drive-based iPod; they should have cranked out a flash memory model to go head-on with the nano - inarguably the home run slugger in Apple's lineup. While I tend to agree with John, I also see a problem with going down this road: Microsoft would likely have had even less room to maneuver, and even fewer things to market ('Beam your tunes') and invent lame, dead-end lingo for - they actually refer to sharing your music wirelessly as 'squirting'. Who wants to bet how excited Steve Ballmer's kids are to 'squirt' at school?Sure, when you look at what you're up against in the DAP market, Apple's iPod nano and SanDisk's respectable 2GB Sansa player (expandable via an SD slot, and at #11 on Amazon as of this writing) are the top dogs to beat - but what could they have offered? I highly doubt they could have fit their DRM-crippled and arguably worthless (though admittedly buzz-worthy) Wi-Fi sharing feature into a nano-sized player, even if they made it slightly larger and uglier like the Zune is to its 30GB iPod rival. A 'Zune nano' with nothing unique to offer would dry up on its own in a market already dominated by Apple, SanDisk and Creative, and Microsoft's exclusive, 3rd party bitch-slap of a music store would have even less of a leg to stand on.In summary: I think John's right - Microsoft made a bad move in copying the 30GB hard drive-based iPod, but it was the only move they had. In this light, it kinda makes you wonder why they bothered in the first place.
GTA:VCS debuts at 6th in UK game charts
Take-Two, the parent company of Rockstar Games, needed some financial help. They looked to the PSP as a source for the big bucks, and it looks like they're making a healthy return. Within one week of sales, the PSP-exclusive Grand Theft Auto: Vice City Stories debuted at number 6 in the UK game charts, making it the top-selling handheld game for the week. With Bully also ranking high, and nary a DS game in sight, it appears that both Take-Two and PSP can breathe a sigh of relief and enjoy their success.[Via Gamespot]
Japanese hardware sales, Oct. 16-22: Mad Lib edition
Ya know, I've thought about coming up with all sorts of creative ways to present you the hardware sales like our sister sites do, but there's really only so many ways you can creatively express the DS Lite's ass kicking of the PSP in Japan. But I'm going to give it a go this week.So, in honor of the Joystiq family tradition, I'll bring you a creative hardware sales post this one time. If you've ever played Mad Libs, you'll know exactly what to do. If not, go outside and play in the street.- DS Lite: 116,941 12,454 (11.92%) - PS2: 22,380 2,347 (9.50%) - PSP: 20,271 1,332 (6.17%) - GBA SP: 2,421122 (5.31%) - Game Boy Micro: 1,660 54 (3.15%) - Xbox 360: 1,287 456 (26.16%) - Gamecube: 638 15 (2.30%) - DS Phat: 130 143 (52.38%) - GBA: 37 25 (67.57%) - Xbox: 6 3 (100.00%)The [insert adjective] DS Lite [insert verb] the PSP's [insert noun] in this week's Japanese hardware sales. But even though the PSP is [insert verb] this week, the [insert noun] is definitely [insert adjective] for the our beloved handheld. Just wait until [insert upcoming PSP game] comes out. Yeah, then things will be different![Source: Media Create]
Japanese hardware sales, 16 October - 22 October: Nintendo All Hallows Eve Edition
Satoru Iwata (dressed as a vampire): DS Lite perform amazing feat in global market! More hundred thousand units in time of week! Much party enjoyment, everyone, so scary is coming! George Harrison (dressed as Link): Ugh, these tights are starting to chafe. Perrin, wanna trade costumes?Perrin Kaplan (dressed as a slutty cat): Um ... no. But you should ask around, really. Has anyone seen Matt? He looks so damn good in that costume ....Matt Cassamassina (dressed as Mega Man, special guest to the event): Perrin. Storage closet. Now.Perrin: Rawr.Iwata: They are doing the fun, yes?George: Uh, yeah. Where's Miyamoto-san, by the way?Iwata: There. (points)George: The dinette set?Shigeru Miyamoto (dressed as a dinette set): Ah! You see, this is the inspiration for my next masterpiece. Get ready for the next generation of fun!George: Sunnuva bitch. Miyamoto, stop doing shrooms, and...ah! Finally, someone normal. But why aren't you dressed up, Reggie?Reggie Fils-Aime: What do you mean?George: It's Halloween. You need a costume. You're just dressed normally.Reggie: This is my costume.George: ...Reggie: Bitch.George: ...Reggie: Now get me a sandwich.George: Friggin' ... fine ....- DS Lite: 116,941 12,454 (11.92%) - PS2: 22,380 2,347 (9.50%) - PSP: 20,271 1,332 (6.17%) - GBA SP: 2,421122 (5.31%) - Game Boy Micro: 1,660 54 (3.15%) - Xbox 360: 1,287 456 (26.16%) - Gamecube: 638 15 (2.30%) - DS Phat: 130 143 (52.38%) - GBA: 37 25 (67.57%) - Xbox: 6 3 (100.00%)[Source: Media Create]
Australian PSP software chart, Oct. 2-8: They like violence
Unfortunately, my beloved Aussies let me down this week by not buying enough PSP games like they did last week; none made it into the top 10. However, they still bought enough to have a top-10 PSP list. 1. Tekken: Dark Resurrection 2. GTA: Liberty Cities 3. Gangs of London 4. Star Wars: Battlefront II 5. Syphon Filter: Dark Mirror 6. Daxter 7. WWE SmackDown! vs. RAW 8. NBA Live 2006 9. NFS: Most Wanted 10. Burnout LegendsWell, it seems like the Aussies love their violence as the top-five games are all about hunting down and killing your opponent in violent fashion. You gotta love it!
