Last week, hardware sales in Japan spiked to a promising high for the Vita. Unfortunately, that surge has quickly died down, as the handheld slips back into third place, behind the 3DS and PS3.
Three weeks ago, the Vita saw a significant bump thanks to the release of Persona 4: The Golden, and then another spike last week thanks to the launch of the Crystal White model of the portable. With nothing of particular note coming to the Vita this week, the sales of the device have slipped significantly from 22,638 to 11,544 units.
However, it’s not just the Vita that is struggling, as gaming hardware across the board in Japan didn’t sell all that much this past week. Nintendo’s handheld dropped from 65,267 to 51,930 units and the PlayStation 3 dropped a couple of thousand in sales to 14,297 (from 16,399). Summer is a slow time of the year for games, but significant drops like this over a single week is a bit surprising.
The unstoppable success of Pokemon Black 2 & White 2 is undoubtedly responsible for some of the slowdown in Vita sales, with the duo of titles selling 181,756 this week and a whopping 2,217,227 the week prior. With so many super popular titles for the 3DS launching in Japan, Sony’s really got to come up some killer apps if they want to compete.
[Via]
