Japan Up - Week 37 - Sep 10-16 2012

[UncleScrooge]

VicViper said:

UncleScrooge said:

Japanese School Holidays are over, right? Sales always drop in Japan when school starts.

I remember back in autumn 2008 when the original DS was still outsold and moved up to 300k units in Japan in a single week - it suddenly dropped, over the course of a couple weeks, to below 80k units and stayed there for the rest of the year. It was like a bubble had burst or something.

Sales usually stay pretty depressing until late November in Japan, when the holiday rush starts to set in. We're in for some rather boring 2 months now.

DS had huge stock issues in Japan. During that time Nintendo sold what it could produce, producing huge bumps in the charts. Maybe that's more likely.

Scratch that, it wasn't 2008 - it was actually in 2007

But no, it wasn't stock issues. That was the first time the DS wasn't sold out in Japan since late 2005. You can use the tools on this side to look at the sales graph (great thing they brought that back). It really dropped like a rock to about 1/2 of what it had done before starting September and it never got up there again outside the holidays - it dropped even lower to about 40k weekly in 2008. Also sales stopped bouncing up and down (which was caused by unregular shipments) as they had done before and instead stayed at a very stable level, indicating decent supply. Look it up here:

http://www.vgchartz.com/tools/hw_date.php?reg=Japan&ending=Weekly

(You need to dis-able other consoles and extend the timeframe to 2005-2012 to get the whole pictures but it's pretty clearly visible).

I actually remember people saying the DS was doomed back then because - coincidentally - the PSP really took off in Japan at the same time with the release of the PSP 2000