No real surprise to see Animal Crossing topping the charts - though perhaps it is slightly surprising that it beat out a DS remake of one of Japan’s favourite games, Chrono Trigger. Guess that proves the Animal Crossing phenomenon is showing no signs of dying down any time soon. Given the success of the DS game, I think this one should sell and sell - though it could be that word-of-mouth is somewhere shy of ’stellar’ when people find out just how similar it is to Wild World.

Square-Enix’s DS remake of the superb Chrono Trigger is in second spot, while Sega’s Saka DS: Touch and Go breaks into the top five too, nudging Kirby down to number six.

Animal Crossing’s week one sales make it already the fourteenth best-selling Wii title to date. Wii Music isn’t even selling fairly steadily any more - a month and a half after release and it’s down to 9000 sales this week. Ouch.

In hardware sales, the DSi outstripped all, with sales of 88,843, though there was a significant spike for the PSP, which rose to 61,226. Wii sales were up to 35,298, while the DS Lite outsold the PS3 - 18,580 to 17, 436. Yikes.

Full details below, stat fans. 

01. [WII] Animal Crossing: City Folk (Nintendo) 305,000 / NEW
02. [NDS] Chrono Trigger DS (Square Enix) 271,000 / NEW
03. [PSP] Gundam vs. Gundam (Namco Bandai) 267,000 / NEW
04. [360] The Last Remnant (Square Enix) 101,000 / NEW
05. [NDS] Saka DS: Touch and Go (SEGA) 72,000 / NEW
06. [NDS] Hoshi no Kirby: Ultra Super Deluxe (Nintendo) 55,000 / 418,000
07. [NDS] Wagamama Fashion Girls Mode (Nintendo) 25,000 / 209,000
08. [NDS] Rhythm Tengoku Gold (Nintendo) 25,000 / 1,184,000
09. [NDS] Pokémon Platinum (Pokémon) 24,000 / 1,941,000
10. [PS3] Way of the Samurai 3 (Spike) 20,000 / 100,000

DSi - 88,843
PSP - 61,226
Wii - 35,298
DSL - 18,580
PS3 - 17,436
X360 - 15,474
PS2 - 5,281

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It was both good and bad news for Nintendo when the US NPD sales figures for October were released. (Mostly good, it has to be said.)

While Wii Music only shifted 81,000 copies in its first two weeks on sale, its host console was a roaring success, with Wii enjoying one of its best months to date, selling an incredible 803,000 units throughout the month. By comparison, the Xbox 360 - benefitting from a price-cut and a host of big-name titles (like Fable II, which pleasingly was the number one selling game for the month) shifted 371,000 consoles. This put it in third place behind the trusty DS, which sold close to half a million.

Slotting in neatly between HD biggies Fable II and Fallout 3 in runner-up spot on the software charts was Wii Fit, with 487,000 balance boards finding their way into homes across the US. Mario Kart Wii and Wii Play rounded out the top five, both selling just under 300,000 copies.

Observations? Well, this so-called ‘fad’ that is the Wii shows no sign of abating. Sony in particular must be getting very worried indeed - particularly as the much-vaunted LittleBIGPlanet (admittedly with not long to impress) was in eighth position with 215,000 copies sold, more than the console it appears on, which limped home with just 190,000 sales to its name. Oh dear. Hit the jump for the sales details in full.

Read the rest of this entry »

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And they’re pretty good - better than the first week sales for the DS Lite and the PSP-2000. DS Lite sales were hugely down, as you’d expect. Overall, the DSi outsold the PSP by more than three-to-one, though you’d expect that for a debut. Elsewhere, the PS3 had a significant spike for GTA and LittleBIGPlanet, but perhaps not as much as some at Sony might have hoped. Meanwhile, the Wii’s starting to struggle a bit - the release of Animal Crossing should bolster sales for a little while, but it’s not doing amazing numbers.

The full figures can be seen below.

DSi 171,925
PSP 50,358
PS3 39,587
Wii 23,123
DS Lite 16,369
PS2 6,714
Xbox 360 6,119

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Well, Michael Pachter wasn’t quite right in his predictions that Wii sold 600,000 units in the US in September. In fact, it shifted a whopping 687,000 consoles, beating the DS into second place, with a comparatively paltry - but actually still impressive - 536,000 handhelds sold.

With the nearest rival being the price-cut Xbox 360 at 347,000 - just over half of Wii’s sales - it’s clear Nintendo’s dominance isn’t showing any signs of ending soon. Indeed, the sales of Wii beat the entire PlayStation family - PS3, PSP and PS2 combined couldn’t match up to Wii’s total, with Sony’s hi-def, Blu-Ray behemoth only managing a total of 232,000 for the month.

As for total sales, Wii will likely overtake PSP next month, as it reached 12.55 million (compared with 12.71 million for Sony’s portable PlayStation). DS, meanwhile, is running away with it at 22.44 million, pretty much double the sales of Xbox 360.

World’s gone mad. Nintendo mad.

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No real surprise there, then. Except for the fact that Nintendo hasn’t had any really major software releases, and it’s still pulling in figures of 600,000 - that’s twice the 360’s estimated total of 300,000, and more than three times PS3’s paltry sum of 175,000 consoles shifted. It’ll be interesting to see whether the recent price-cuts and the spate of quality upcoming software can make the HD consoles challenge a little harder over the winter months, but I wouldn’t get my hopes up too high if I was Microsoft, and particularly Sony, which seems to be increasingly fighting a losing battle in the US.

It’s really quite astonishing - Nintendo started this generation firmly in third place. It released a console that can’t compete with its rivals from a purely technical standpoint. It took a massive gamble with Wii, and it’s clearly paid off. The novelty factor hasn’t worn off, the viral nature of Wii’s success doesn’t seem to be just a flash in the pan, either. And even the increased uptake of HD televisions has barely had an effect on sales.

The 360 now has value on its side, but I wonder if the console’s reliability (or lack thereof - my debug model went and died on me today, right at the end of Fable II) is affecting its chances in a bigger way than Microsoft realises. The coming months will tell its own story, but for now at least, Nintendo remains firmly on top. Expect official figures very soon, but Pachter’s not going to be too far off the mark.

Thanks, VG247.

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Well, it looks like switching on the Hadron Collider may not have caused the structure of the universe to collapse after all. Earlier this week Enterbrain, the company that publishes Famitsu magazine, said that the Xbox 360 outsold Wii for the first time ever, as we reported here. However, today it transpires that Media Create, the more reliable Japanese sales figures gurus, have the Wii in first place among the home consoles for the week ending September 14th… just.

Here are the figures in full:

• DS - 63,859
• PSP - 30,156
• Wii - 29,686
• 360 - 28,188
• PS3 - 8,053
• PS2 - 7,669

Phew! A close shave, eh? Will the 360 ever get this close again? Certainly, despite the correction, the Japanese sales battle is more exciting then ever, and the run-up to Christmas could yet be full of surprises.

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Staggering stuff. The original FT story puts it best: “The programmers of Super Mario Galaxy will generate more profit this year than the average Goldman Sachs banker has ever managed.”

As Edge-Online has it, ”Nintendo employs less than 3,000 permanent staff, each of whom takes home an average annual salary of $90,900 a year.”

By contrast, Goldman Sachs, who had a record-breaking 2007, made $1.24 million per employee, whose pay averaged out at a significantly larger $660,000.

I can’t help but wish that Nintendo would put some of this to good use and invest in some fresh development talent to bolster Wii’s line-up, particularly when it comes to games more likely to appeal to its core audience. Some new IP perhaps? I mean, does Nintendo really need to be making that much?

Still, it’s number one so why try harder, eh?

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August’s NPD sales figures are out for North America, and once again Nintendo claimed victory, with Wii and DS comfortably outselling their rivals, though sales were a lot slower than in recent months.

Nintendo sold 514,000 DS sytems in August, meaning the handheld is now approaching 22 million units sold in the US. Wii was close behind on 448,000, which brings its US tally to almost 12 million.

Five of the top ten games were on either Wii or DS, though Madden NFL 09 All-Play at number 9 was comfortably outsold by its counterparts on 360 and PS3, the former topping a million sales with the Wii game shifting a comparatively paltry 116,000 copies. Wii Fit and Mario Kart Wii continued their recent successes, both topping 300,000 sales for the month, with the former just a squeak away from 400,000.

“We’re still smiling, and we hope everyone else is smiling too. Smile! Smile, goddammit!” Cammie Dunaway didn’t say, instead choosing to focus on the fact that “the positive public response to Nintendo DS and Wii has stayed strong throughout 2008″ in Nintendo’s official press release. Perhaps it was unwise to talk about Madden helping to demonstrate the wide appeal of Wii games. It seems some people still prefer to play certain games on a standard controller. 

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Desperate to scotch the myth that third-party games don’t sell on Wii, Nintendo has released a set of figures and graphs (which they’re getting rather fond of recently) showing that they do.

Though the percentage pales into comparison with the equivalent amount on Xbox 360 and PS3 (representing 56% of total sales, compared with 84% and 82% respectively), the amount for third party sales sits at 33 million of a total of 60 million software sales, compared with 29 million of 35 million, and 20 million of 25 million - though this only represents the sales for the first twenty months at market. Naturally, Microsoft’s third-party sales are likely to look a lot healthier at present.

Yet Microsoft has countered with some figures of its own, suggesting that third-party games sell significantly less on Wii because those figures represent a greater number of titles.

The total third party sales for the Xbox 360 since launch sits at 67,929,999 units, with the Wii on 33,394,311 units and the PlayStation 3 in third place, on 19,976,325 units. Microsoft suggests if we divide the units sold by the number of titles released since November 2006, then the Wii sales look less impressive, with each software unit shifting an average  of 132, 517 copies, compared to 156,065 on the PS3 and 217, 252 on 360. “No matter how you slice it, the Wii third party game story is not a pretty one” said MS spokesperson David Dennis.

Three things which are strange about all this:

1. Why are the TOTAL figures being divided by the number of games released since November 2006? Because that’s bound to skew the figures in favour of Microsoft, that’s why.

2. Why is Microsoft not boasting about its own figures, instead of concentrating on those released by a rival? Surely it would make sense to put positive spin on its own situation rather than badmouthing Nintendo? Seems a bit silly, really.

3. But hang on - didn’t Microsoft suggest a while back that Nintendo wasn’t a rival, and was essentially competing in a different market?

Curiouser and curiouser. Expect this to rumble on a while longer, especially as we’re due the NPD figures soon, which tend to send the PR machines spinning into overdrive.

Thanks to Joystiq and VG247

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It seems as if the latest in the Fire Emblem series - and the franchises’s debut on DS - could well be on top in Japan next week. With Phantasy Star Portable selling out all over Japan, stock shortages might prevent the PSP title from earning a second week on top, and impressive sales of 80,000 on its first day will likely see Fire Emblem DS take over instead.

The series isn’t exactly import-unfriendly, but given that half of Fire Emblem’s appeal comes from its characters and your conversations with them (adding to the emotional attachment you feel when they’re in danger of popping their clogs and not coming back), this is one best left for its western release. Sadly, there’s no confirmation of a PAL or US release in 2008, so it looks like we might have to wait until early next year for our turn-based strategy fix.

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