My love of Heath prevents me from being a real weather man. When I'm right about stuff, I can't shut up about it. I am aware of my own flaws as a person. Ready for a weather boner?
Recently, I said that the Vita would sink below 20,000, and then take "another step lower" in the following week's sales charts. This happened, as the charts from two weeks ago saw the Vita move down to 12,000 units sold. The current chart, just released today, show it moving down yet again, hitting around 11,000. I do think next week will see an improvement, though, with some actual frigging software set to ship. Here are Media Create's hardware sales charts for the week ending May 19.
3DS – 37,124
PS3 – 10,948
Vita – 10,931
PSP – 6,524
Wii U – 6,037
Wii – 1,143
Xbox 360 – 349
Software charts had virtually no new games, and therefore, few surprises. Summon Night 5 for PSP was one of the extremely few new releases last week, and it sold over 100,000 copies to smoke everything else. The 3DS trio of Luigi's Mansion 2, Animal Crossing: New Leaf, and Friend Collection are all still hanging out near the top. Expect 3DS to stay ranked #1 in hardware positioning for a long time. In the immediate future, it has some huge stuff coming out, including a Tamagochi game (this is still big in Japan), and Shin Megami Tensei IV. The latter is being released with a hardware bundle, and it'll probably open the system up to an audience that doesn't already have a 3DS. I therefore expect the system to easily climb back over 50k next week. It might not be dethroned until the long-awaited arrival of the Final Fantasy X remaster gives Vita its inevitable boost.
The Wii-U isn't even worth predictions at this point, but I guess I'll make some for the hell of it. Slight increase soon, but nothing big. All four of the systems above Wii-U are older — some of them several years older — which is terrible for any system. The hot new thing should be, well, hot when it is new. Nintendo's new console will share its only new game of the month when Biohazard Revelations is released for 360, PS3, and Wii-U this Thursday. On June 6, it gets Rabbit Land and arrives late to the Injustice party, but after that, it's waiting a while till another game launch. The F1 game launching on June 27 isn't going to stimulate a market movement in Japan.
A major price cut combined with the arrival of an onslaught of software took the 3DS from the basement to the sky, but it remains to be seen whether Nintendo has a second miracle in store.
Know what it definitely does have in store? A whole bunch of unsold Wii-U's.
