This Week In Sales: Square Enix’s New IP Fails To Take Off

Period: The week of June 10th – June 16th (2013)

Top-seller: Donkey Kong Country Returns 3D – 104,569

Nintendo 3DS sales: 17,602 | Total sales: 8,354,627

Nintendo 3DS XL sales: 29,533 | Total sales: 3266521

PlayStation Vita sales: 10,664 | Total sales: 1,626,398

Wii U sales: 5,983 | Total sales: 947,899

<< Last week’s software sales chart

Square Enix have been attempting to turn their transforming car franchise, Gyrozetter, into an established multimedia brand, but things may not be going according to plan.

Last December, former Square Enix president Yoichi Wada explained that the Gyrozetter arcade game wasn’t doing as well as the company would have liked, and explained why he felt this was the case. Now, half a year later, it looks the Gyrozetter RPG on Nintendo 3DS might not have much more luck than the arcade game did either.

Gyrozetter: Wings of the Albatross was released in Japan last week, and sold a mere 18,000 copies in its first week. Ouch. Not quite the start you’d expect from a game that already has an arcade game, an anime tie-in, and merchandising behind it.

Back in December, Wada said that he felt it was a mistake to release the Gyrozetter arcade game before the anime began to air, and that doing so robbed Square Enix of the opportunity to properly explain the appeal of the game. Perhaps Gyrozetter just got off to a bad start from the get-go, and it’s proving harder to undo the damage at this point.

Or perhaps there just aren’t enough features in the 3DS game to make it a must-buy for the school boys’ market. After all, between publishers like Level 5, Nintendo, Namco and Capcom all competing for a piece of that audience, competition is now tougher than ever.

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

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