This Week In Sales: Love Is In The Air

Period: The week of February 13th – February 19th (2012)

Top-seller: New LovePlus – 104,969

Nintendo 3DS sales: 94,667 | Total sales: 5,026,621

PlayStation Vita sales: 12,309 | Total sales: 578,812

New LovePlus was the big release in Japan last week, and the Nintendo 3DS game sold close to 105,000 copies at launch, stealing the #1 spot on the software sales chart. That’s a lot of love, and is higher than first-week sales of LovePlus+ on Nintendo DSi in 2010 (84,364 first week).

At the #3 spot was another new Nintendo 3DS release, Theatrhythm: Final Fantasy. This one’s a little more complicated.

Theatrhythm only sold 67,000 copies in its first week, but multiple reports have indicated that the game has sold out at stores, and is even sold out on Amazon.jp. This means that Square Enix underestimated demand and didn’t ship enough copies to stores. A second shipment isn’t expected until February 25th, so it should be interesting to see what Theatrhythm numbers look like next week.

Together, New LovePlus and Theatrhythm: Final Fantasy drove Nintendo 3DS hardware sales to over 94,000 units for the week. Additionally, despite the numerous new releases during the week, Resident Evil: Revelations continues to hang on in the top-ten (now at 232,000 copies sold), which is nice to see.

Another 3DS title for the week was a multiplatform release. Chunsoft published Extreme Escape Adventure: Good People Die for both the 3DS and PlayStation Vita. The 3DS version sold 9,300 copies while the Vita version sold 6,500 copies.

Finally, Tekken 3D Prime Edition was released on the 3DS as well, and sold a mere 9,400 copies. This isn’t surprising, as portable Tekken games have been in decline since Tekken: Dark Resurrection in 2006. Take a look at these first-week numbers for the PSP Tekken games for comparison:

Tekken: Dark Resurrection (2006) – 49,426

Tekken 6 (2010) – 25,131

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