
Media Create's Japanese sales data for the past week has just been released, revealing a plummet for Virtua Fighter 5 (number one a week earlier, number 25 last week) and a great start for this week's WINNER, Professor Layton:
- Professor Layton and the Mysterious Town - 136,736 units sold last week (new entry / Level-5, DS)
- Tales of Destiny 2 - 73,022 (new entry / NamcoBandai, PSP)
- Bleach DS 2nd - 45,486 (new entry / Sega, DS)
- Death Note - 44,600 (new entry / Konami, DS)
- Soul Cradle - 43,253 (new entry / Nippon Ichi, PS2)
- Picross DS - 41,105 (156,664 sales to date / Nintendo, DS)
- Dragon Quest Monsters Joker - 39,598 (1,134,069 / SquareEnix, DS)
- Wii Sports - 39,128 (1,043,683 / Nintendo, Wii)
- Wii Play - 29,342 (908,774 / Nintendo, Wii)
- More Brain Training - 28,254 (3,991,966 / Nintendo, DS)
- Professor Layton, you are the WINNER
- PS2 is still a viable format in Japan, with four titles in Media Create's Top 30
- Very soon, Nintendo will have provided More Brain Training to four million Japanese minds



















(Page 1) Reader Comments
Hope it comes out here sometime far apart from Pokemon
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Wii Play is a DS game?
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Japan's PS2 attach rate: 1.3
Japan's DS attach rate: 3.9
::DS explodes my head::
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Don't get me wrong, it's great and the touch screen is awesome for gaming, but "too much love will kill you" :D
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So much for it being their savior in japan.
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So much for it being their savior in japan."
Here's my theory. VF5 is an arcade game. It's all about the arcade experience. Thus, there is no rush to buy it on a console when you have your magnetic card and stats at your local arcade.
Meanwhile, no self respecting fighting game fan would be caught playing DOA in an arcade. At home, however, perverts get a free pass. One handed Suzuki School Of Fighting.
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Either you're reading that wrong or the stat is wrong. My guess is you're reading it wrong; it sounds like that would be sales for one single year. That's not what attach rate means; you can't break out attach rate by period of time. Attach rate means attach rate; it's the number of games people own for a system, on average.
I actually looked on that site and I didn't find those numbers, but I do know that various other numbers they have are just completely wrong. Their "total" number of console games sold in Japan seems to include about 200-300 of the 4,554 PlayStation 2 games that have been released there. They seem to only be counting games that have appeared on the top 30 charts that they have access to. In the grand scheme of things, that actually only represents a fraction of the total games sold (there might be 30 top games that sell 500,000 copies in a week, but 5,000 other games that sell a total of 2 million copies in a week).
Still, those numbers would not be surprising for a single year when you've got basically an EOL'd system. But the PS2 has probably sold around 300 million or so games in its lifetime in Japan, assuming a conservative average of about 60,000 units sold for each game. Its attach rate in 2003 was up around 13... it's easily higher than that now. (There's a reason nobody bothers talking about attach rates years after launch anymore; they eventually end up in the 20 or so range and nobody cares anymore.)
Anyway, the only real information anyone should take from your post is that the DS is currently doing better than the PS2, which I don't think is news to anyone.
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DS is game machine/cool accessory/cheap electronic dictionary/learning tool for the Japanese. There's something for everyone and everyone is buying one.
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The Wii's dimensions are about 5 cm × 11.5 cm × 21 cm. I find it hard to believe that space is an issue when you're talking about a console that tiny.
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By the way: I have a 12 square meter appartement in Tokyo and that is HUGE by student standards. So, yeah, DS makes sense. Plus, here you have just the games the audience loves, dunno about US/Europe/etc.
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