Japanese hardware sales, May 11 - May 17: The Thirdening edition

34.62%. That's the average rate of decrease in the Japanese gaming hardware market over this past week. It's an unprecedented universal sales decline which scientists, analysts and scientanalysts are referring to as "The Thirdening."

"See, everyone's sales dropped by about one-third," Scientanalyst Robert Glasser explained. "Also, it kinda sounds like the title of that horrible Marky Mark film that came out last summer. We thought it was pretty clever."

While this startling phenomenon may have become an item of interest for the casual outside observer, those who've witnessed -- or worse, fallen prey to -- other historic sales declines find the situation to be far less amusing.

"I ain't ne'er seen nuffin like this," the now retired, farm-owning GameBoy Advance replied, clearly forgetting its own disastrous "Hundred Percentening" in 2003.

"We weren't too clever with the naming of that one," Glasser said. "I mean, 'Hundred Percentening,' really? Man, we totally dropped the ball."

- DSi: 34,152 21,230 (38.33%)
- PSP: 28,683 14,326 (33.31%)
- Wii: 15,116 9,281 (38.04%)
- PS3: 11,605 6,878 (37.21%)
- DS Lite: 4,888 2,933 (37.50%)
- PS2: 4,020 1,117 (21.74%)
- Xbox 360: 3,233 1,835 (36.21%)

[Source: Media Create]

See: The archivining