Ben-DutkaSony recently announced they had hit their goal of shipping 2 million PS3s, and Nintendo fared equally well with their Wii. However, it seems sales of both next-gen consoles have slowed in Japan, probably due to the time of year and a lack of games for both.
According to the latest numbers, courtesy of Media-Create, Sonly only managed to sell 25,531 during the week ending January 14. That is the lowest PS3 weekly sales figure since the system hit Japan's market on November 11. Nintendo also experienced a lapse for the same week in January, selling only 93,708 Wiis. And just like the PS3, it was the second-worst week in terms of unit sales since the system launched on December 2.
In terms of software, those sales were also down. Resistance: Fall of Man for the PS3 claimed the #40 spot on the sales charts, but other than that, there wasn't much to crow about. Perhaps when either Sony or Nintendo get around to actually releasing some games, we'll see some more sales.
But hey, despite the bad news, at least they're not Microsoft. Despite heavily promoting the 360 in the Japanese marketplace and signing on several Japanese developers, they're still lagging far behind. For the week ending January 14, only 9,035 360s were sold in Japan, which is another decline. The console experienced a boost with the release of the Blue Dragon bundled 360 set, but that doesn't appear to have any lasting impact.
It's just a bad time of year for sales of anything, what with the holiday credit card bills arriving this month. It's to be expected. We just hope to see more games for the PS3 and Wii…soon.
