From MGC tracking info, Eternal Sonata is going to do fairly well for it's first week.

Currently, it's already reached the top 5 RPGs on MGC.net. Blue Dragon, nor Two Worlds did that in their first week. ES is way behind BD and TW, but still popping in the charts with only US and Canada getting cards noted is big.

Updating J-#s soon...

Do you know why the Halo : history pack isn't tracked it did fairly well on Amazon.jp.

No idea. Neither it, or Mousou Orochi were tracked by ioi.

However, I'd assume HHP did around 4500-5000 units first week....Which is bad.

Nevertheless, thats MS's fault. They made the game for the Xbox - and didn't market it to the X360 crowd. No one is going to buy a game for the most failed console in Japan.

Had Microsoft of said it was only on X360, and sold it at a decent price, it would of probably sold 4x that first week, if not more.

I have been lurking on this site for a few months as I like the sales data that this site puts together.

I must say that this weekly thread is one of my favourites and I certainly appreciate mrstickball for writing it up every week.

Obviously the sales data for the US is excellent this week. It is great to see Bioshock doing so well for two reasons, 1) Its exceptional and deserves a place in everyone's game library; and 2) Hopefully it might encourage developers to take a chance on new and innovative IPs.

The Japan numbers are quite depressing and reinforce how important it is for Microsoft to ensure that the 360 regularly receives new games that can keep sales relatively high. Regular high-profile releases appear to be its best chance to generate some momentum and whilst it is selling relatively better than the original Xbox there are substantial gains to be made through superior scheduling. Hopefully things will change a bit with Halo 3 being released and a little momentum carrying through to Lost Odyssey over the Christmas period.

The Halo History Pack wasn't that expensive. I picked it up new for just over 2400 yen(~$21), which is pretty cheap for halo 1 and 2. It's placed in the 360 section of all the game stores/electronics stores, I've been to.

I'm not sure about any advertising, but I did see one electronic store selling the 360 premium system w/the HHS included as part of their store bundle pack (at least for a week or so) as I'm not sure how long they will keep that up.

To be fair about Japan......

Microsoft is doing fairly well, despite the horrid list of games that it has, and sales have been unique to say the least.

Microsoft has around 400,000-420,000 hardware units available in Japan, that consumers can purchase games on (obviously). At this point, when the Xbox was at 400,000, absolutely no games sold. The last created game for the Xbox that was big, Ninja Gaiden in 2004 I believe, only sold 66,000 - again with 400k hardware units sold.

Fast forward to now, MS has the same ammount of units. The difference is, games are selling far better than the Xbox's countepart. What does this mean? In 2004, most Xbox owners could of cared less about their Xbox, and had moved on to Playstation 2's.

In 2007, however, games like Oblivion and Trusty Bell have done rather well, both selling over 70k with the same # of systems - and I'd argue that a NInja Gaiden at this point would sell well over NG's 66k in Japan.

And again, Oblivion, Blue Dragon, and Viva Pinata continue to do insanely well on the X360 format. Oblivion totally came out of nowhere, when everyone thought it'd do 20k LTD, and wound up selling 20k in under a day, and has had the 2nd best legs of any X360 game out there.

Likewise, Viva Pinata has had a 13x multiplier - something no X360 game has had. Despite the horrible 20k sales, it got there with a 1,599 first-week cume. Pretty good, eh? Blue Dragon also has a great multiplier for a very frontloaded RPG. If Blue Dragon 2 came out on X360 in 2009, it would probably wind up hitting 500k by then.

So all numbers must be compared, analyized and rated vs. comparibles. The issue is that there are very few comparibles with the Xbox and X360, since both are so poorly recieved in Japan. However, atleast the X360's sales are INCREASING year over year versus decreasing, like many failures have (Xbox, Dreamcast, Gamecube).

If anyone cares:

I was reading a few articles from Shinobi. They stated, and confirmed VGC numbers about Oblivion: It's already over 70,000 on the X360.

 That's very good news for western developers. What are your expectations for assassin's creed?