3DS Sales Turnaround

An interesting statistic was released last week – in less than two years the 3DS has sold more units in Japan than the PS3 has in its six year lifecycle.

According to Media Create (via Nintendo Life) the latest portable sold 211,499 in the first week of December bringing its cumulative total to a whopping 8,799,378 units since its launch. The PS3 has still managed to sell 8,716,260 units in Japan since it’s launch in 2006.

Nintendo and Sony always do better in the Asian market than Microsoft and this can be seen in the statistics published at the bottom of this page. In fact the only console to sell more units in the first week of December was the brand new Wii U system which only released on 8^th December and therefore only has 1 day of sales to back up the statistics.

The most impressive thing about the 3DS’s accomplishment is that it has only really been out just over 18 months and, especially at first, we were all thinking the launch had gone badly for the Japanese developer.

The 3DS has a prime competitor now too in the form of the Playstation Vita but this seems to have failed to catch on in Sony’s homeland where it only managed to shift 11,039 units in the same week. Strangely the PSP sold more units in the same week with a grand total of 19,637 consoles sold.

Below is the full chart on Japan's hardware sales last week. Lifetime sales are in parenthesis.

■Nintendo Wii U - 308,142 (308,142)

■Nintendo 3DS - 211,499 (8,799,378)

■PlayStation 3 - 36,994 (8,716,260)

■PSP - 19,637 (19,488,236)

■PlayStation Vita - 11,039 (1,074,621)

■Nintendo Wii - 6,714 (12,608,700)

■Xbox 360 - 1,216 (1,608,399)

■PlayStation 2 - 904 (21,829,112)

■Nintendo DS - 424 (32,875,469)