This Week In Sales: Sequels, Sequels Everywhere

Period: The week of March 23rd  – March 29th (2015)

Top-seller: Bloodborne (PS4) – 152,567

Nintendo 3DS sales: 2,883 | Tot. sales: : 9,825,992

Nintendo 3DS XL sales: 2,233 | Tot. sales: 6,892,804

New Nintendo 3DS sales: 7,290 | Tot. sales: 512,867

New Nintendo 3DS XL sales: 18,823 | Tot. sales: 1,228,298

PlayStation Vita sales: 26,324 | Tot. sales: 3,662,478

Vita TV sales: 708 | Tot. sales: 159,474

Wii U sales: 6,698 | Tot. sales: 2,262,129

PlayStation 4 sales: 45,446 | Tot. sales: 1,349,101

Xbox One sales: 250 | Tot. sales: 49,107

<< Last week’s software sales chart

<< How to read and understand sales

Last week, Sony released From Software’s Bloodborne in Japan. The game, a PlayStation 4 title, sold 152,567 copies in its first week. That’s a lower debut than both Dark Souls (279,567) and Dark Souls II (261,147).

Given that PlayStation 4 sales in Japan are only at 1.34 million so far, it isn’t very surprising that Bloodborne saw a far lower debut than those two titles, which were released on the PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360. It should be interesting to see how many units the game can move over the next year.

Meanwhile, Senran Kagura: Estival Versus was also released in Japan last week. However, the game only sold 74,795 copies in its first week, not 100,000 copies as producer Kenichiro Takaki suggested over Twitter. (That probably means Takaki was discussing sales of the game beyond its first week.)

The 74,795 figure puts Estival Versus below the launch figures of Senran Kagura: Shinovi Versus, which sold 94,324 copies in its first week, despite now being on two platforms.

Finally, Nippon Ichi Software released Disgaea 5 for PlayStation 4 last week, and the game sold 22,725 copies at launch, marking the lowest debut for a Disgaea  game in several years.

For reference, Disgaea 3 sold 54,596 copies at launch while Disgaea 4 sold 79,425 copies at launch. NIS have insisted that they do not intend to port Disgaea 5 to the PlayStation Vita for added sales, claiming that the game is “impossible” to port over without cutting down the amount of assets and features present so, given its low sales, it should be interesting to see what happens next.

On a related note, the company also recently stated that it is developing games exclusively on PlayStation 4 and PlayStation Vita for the remainder of the year. Given that Disgaea is typically their strongest property, it should also be interesting to see how their other projects for the year perform.

And with that, the top-20 software sales chart for last week is as follows:

Sales data acquired from 4Gamer and Media Create.