14 DAY TRIAL // The official sales figures from Japanese sales tracking firm Media Create show that the newly launched PlayStation Vita handheld from Sony has sold exactly 324,859 units during its first two days on sale, a good but certainly not perfect debut for the platform.
The number one position in the Japanese video game hardware chart, as compiled by Media Create for the week that ended on December 18, is occupied by the Nintendo 3DS, another handheld, which has managed the impressive feat of improving one an already record breaking period by pushing seven day sales up to 367,691 device coming from over 350,000.
Atsushi Hosokawa, who is the Chief Executive Officer at Media Create, stated, “To be honest we would like to have seen it sell a bit more, but you can say that it reached a certain level of success.”
He also believes that the low sales during the weekend period, which represented about 60 percent of the number of devices that Sony actually shipped, is linked to the high launch price of the Vita and the lack of strong video games.
Meanwhile sales of the Nintendo 3DS were improved because of the price cut delivered earlier during the year and because the publisher pushed out a number of high profile titles, from Super Mario 3D Land and Mario Kart 7 to Monster Hunter 3G.
Third place in the hardware chart was picked up by the PlayStation 3 home console from Sony, which also improved its sales total, going from 44,661 to 65,119.
The normal PlayStation Portable continues to sell well, which much be a concern for Sony, and also increased its total, reaching 64,468 from a previous week performance of 51,191.
The Wii is also on the ascendancy before the holiday period, reaching sales of 60,916, while the XL version of the Nintendo DS sold more than 5,000.
The Xbox 360, with sales of 3,584, performed better than the DSi, the PlayStation 2 and the DS Lite.