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3DS Sales Jump 5000%, Price Drop Impact (AGiJ Side Note)

By Heath | August 18, 2011 at 9:47 am

OK so it’s closer to 4745% but holy freaking damn, close enough. 
During the first week of August in Japan, the 3DS sold a meager 4,100 units. This most recent week, however, might mark an official rebirth of Nintendo’s retina killer. Check out the sales charts for August 8 – 14 below.
3DS: 196,077
PSP: 40,409
PS3: 20,239
Wii: 19,607
DS: 7,834
Xbox 360: 1,576
PS2: 1,513

Kinda goes without saying that that’s a huge jump, but I just said it anyway because that’s what game journalists are good at: stating the obvious. I’m also gonna make up some history and claim that for a system at least six months old, that amount of increase from one week to another has never happened before in the history of all time. I’m not sure if that’s actually true, but doesn’t it sound just right?

What I do know for sure is that walking around my Japanese hometown, I’d recently seen stacks and stacks of unsold 3DSs laying around game shops, and they’re now considerably smaller in nearly every location that I frequent. My anecdotal research plus something that sounds true = new fact.

We’ll see how long it holds up, though. Dropping the jokes, we’ve seen this before out of Nintendo’s bi-polar 3DS — that routine of selling like mad followed by basically bottoming out a week later. Star Fox, Ocarina of Time, and the new red color system all gave it quick bursts of high sales that fizzled out just as quickly as they came. As a spectator, I’m interested to see how it all goes down. Won’t be dipping into that pool myself though, ’cause 3D hurts the shit out of my eyes. I’ve had PRK surgery on both so that might have something to do with it.  What it will absolutely need more of is some must-have software.  As the PSP is proving in its twilight years (in Japan), software sells systems.  Right now, there’s just not much to lure people into dropping cash on a new machine, and without the games, these Nintendo high times will be short lived.  Good luck, big N.

The PSP continues to sell strongly. 3DS doing what it will, 40,000 is still a great week of sales, especially in Japan and especially when it’s over six years old. One might wonder just how much the PS3 price cut will affect its sales; we’ll have to wait till next week for those numbers to be released though.

In other news, I reviewed Tales series spinoff Tales of VS on PlayStation LifeStyle, and you can check my review out here. It’s that four-player fighter featuring a bunch of Tales characters. Not as fun as it might have initially sounded, sadly. Meh.

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Topics: American Gamer in Japan