Japanese hardware sales, September 17-23

For the week ending September 16th, we saw the expected dethroning of the DS Lite in Japan’s weekly sales as the launch of Final Fantasy VII: Crisis Core for the PSP. The DS Lite fell about 15,000 units below PSP sales for the week. For the week ending September 23rd, however, we deal with the launch of the PSP Slim. As a result, the DS Lite fell to about 1/4th the sales of the competition, while the rest of the hardware chart remained relatively stationary.

There’s no doubt this second week of not being #1 is going to be rough on Nintendo fans, but it just goes to show how times have changed. Not to worry though, as Nintendo’s got a solid software line-up coming up all around the world, so those DS (and Wii) sales should start to climb again in the coming weeks. We’re not going to have a PSP launch every week either.

PSP: 277,794 (+182,307)
DSL: 70,523 (-9,451)
Wii: 24,992 (-1,189)
PS2: 11,373 (-1,755)
PS3: 10,732 (-2,369)
X360: 1,687 (+444)
GBM: 243 (-471)
GBASP: 106 (-16)
GC: 68 (-29)
GBA: 33 (+33)
DS: 15 (0)