As reported by USA Today, the 3DS:
…has outsold the Nintendo DS by about 1 million units in their respective first 14 months in the market “and the DS went on to become the best-selling gaming hardware system ever.”
It doesn’t mean the momentum will continue, of course, but it’s doing well enough for itself so far.
For yet another week, the 3DS has topped the charts in Japan. It sold 63,796 units, compared to the 8,250 units of the PlayStation Vita. The full rankings were as follows:
(The figures in the brackets are the previous week’s sales.)
In terms of games, it was a PSP title that took the top spot, but the 3DS is well-represented with games such as Kingdom Hearts 3D, Super Mario 3D Land, Kid Icarus: Uprising, Monster Hunter 3G and Mario Kart 7 in the top ten. The full list of games and their sales numbers can be found after the break.
The sales figures from Media Create have been released and it’s clear the 3DS has build a sturdy base of momentum. There were a total of 68,951 hardware units sold (compared to only 10,041 of the Vita), and you can check after the break to see the top twenty best-selling games, the vast majority of which are for 3DS.
Nintendo has revealed that the 3DS has sold about 4.5 million units in its first year on the market, surpassing the Nintendo DS’s first year of sales in eight months. There were also about nine million units of 3DS software sold in the first year compared to the 5 million units sold in the DS’s first year. Basically, it’s selling well.
Nintendo has announced that the 3DS has sold over 5,000,000 units in under one year. To compare, it took the Game Boy Advance fifty-eight weeks to reach this milestone, and it took fifty-six weeks for the Nintendo DS to do the same. There’s a graph after the break to see the sales relative to other Nintendo platforms.
Satoru Iwata shared the above chart in an investor meeting, also mentioning that:
…at the end of last year which reported that the total unit sales of the Nintendo 3DS reached four million faster than the Nintendo DS or the Wii. However, at that time, this pace was not the fastest in Japan’s video game history, since it was slower than that of the Game Boy Advance. But, the Nintendo 3DS did not lose its momentum even after the new year, and two weeks ago it broke the record of the fastest sales pace.
And I’m assuming we can stop saying the 3DS is doomed. It seems to be doing quite well.
Enterbrain in Japan is reporting that the 3DS broke a monthly sales record last month. According to them, the 3DS sold 1,492,931 units this past December. That is apparently the highest amount any console has sold in a single month since Enterbrain began tracking sales in 1997. If accurate, this is a very impressive feat.