This Week In Sales: Soul Sacrifice Takes One For The Team

Period: The week of March 4th – March 10th (2013)

Top-seller: Hatsune Miku: Project Diva F – 110,229

Nintendo 3DS sales: 21,207 | Total sales: 8,076,904

Nintendo 3DS XL sales: 39,801 | Total sales: 2,748,399

PlayStation Vita sales: 63,581 | Total sales: 1,357,988

Wii U sales: 9,454 | Total sales: 810,481

<< Last week’s software sales chart

Last week, Sega released an updated version of rhythm game, Hatsune Miku: Project Diva F, on the PlayStation 3, featuring six new songs and new modules for the Vocaloid characters as well. The game sold 110,229 copies in its first week. That isn’t too shabby at all, considering that the original PlayStation Vita version of the game, released in September 2012, sold 159,592 copies in week 1.

Following Project Diva F at the #2 spot on the software sales chart was Soul Sacrifice, Sony’s own take on the “hunting action” genre, following in the footsteps of games like Monster Hunter and God Eater. Sony have been building up to its release for over half a year now, with a variety of promotions and television commercials to help raise awareness of the game.

For starters, every PlayStation Vita sold from January 23rd onwards came with a Soul Sacrifice demo installed on it. Additionally, Sony had Tsutaya, a large retail chain in Japan, rent out free physical copies of the demo as well. This was followed by an announcement that every copy of Soul Sacrifice would come with a free 30-day PlayStation Plus trial. Finally, Sony also announced a PlayStation Vita hardware bundle for Soul Sacrifice, and a double pack containing two copies of the game for a heavily discounted price.

The effort has paid off, but only to an extent. The standard edition and hardware bundles for Soul Sacrifice sold 92,396, and Sony sold another 22,050 copies of the double pack, bringing total first-week retail sales to 114,446. No doubt the game also sold additional copies via download sales, although Sony haven’t announced a figure yet.

Namco Bandai released a PlayStation Vita game last week, too—Tales of Hearts R, a remake of a Nintendo DS game with new 3D visuals and additional playable characters. Tales of Hearts R sold 55,258 copies in its first week. That’s a slight increase over Tales of Innocence R, also a Nintendo DS remake for Vita, which sold 54,853 copies in week 1 at launch.

Meanwhile, PlayStation Vita sales for the week were more or less consistent with the week prior, when Sony dropped the price of the device at 63,581 units sold.

The top-20 chart for the week was as follows:

Note: Next week’s sales data will be made available a day later than usual (March 21st) due to a national holiday, Shunbun no Hi, taking place in Japan on the 20th.

Sales data acquired from 4Gamer, Media Create and Geimin.net.