PlayStation 3 sales spank the Wii in Japan

by Stevie Smith - Apr 8 2009, 15:45

While unlikely to amount to very much more than a temporary loosening of Nintendo’s grip on the home console market, Japanese unit figures for March saw Sony’s apparently flagging PlayStation 3 surge well beyond the motion-sensing Wii.

More pointedly, renowned videogame magazine publisher Enterbrain has revealed that Sony sold 146,948 PlayStation 3 consoles across Japan in the five weeks running up to March 29, while Nintendo’s massively popular Wii sold 99,335 units.

However, while Sony’s hardware sales boost equates to the first time in some 16 months that the PlayStation 3 has outsold the Nintendo Wii in Japan, the boosted numbers are being attributed to the recent release of PS3 heavyweight software titles Resident Evil 5 and Yakuza 3, both of which have a huge following in the region.

Driving that point home, Sega Sammy’s Yakuza 3 (a.k.a. Ryu Ga Gotoku 3) and Capcom’s Resident Evil 5 (a.k.a. Biohazard 5) certainly played a contributing role by placing first and second respectively on March’s software chart in Japan.

Whether or not Sony is able to maintain its sales momentum remains to be seen, but either way Nintendo’s feathers certainly don’t appear to be ruffled at this point.

With the Wii clearly dominant on the world stage thanks to more than 50 million total unit sales compared to just over 21 million for the PS3, a spokesperson for the company told The Financial Times that, while the PlayStation 3 has indeed surged, “it is still the first few months of the year when sales are slow for the industry, so we are not particularly concerned.”

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