This Week In Sales: DmC Devil May Cry

Period: The week of January 14th – January 20th (2013)

Top-seller: DmC Devil May Cry – 110,429

Nintendo 3DS sales: 30,840 | Total sales: 7,879,708

Nintendo 3DS XL sales: 51,015 | Total sales: 2,353,947

PlayStation Vita sales: 9,036 | Total sales: 1,184,258

Wii U sales: 16,654 | Total sales: 731,739

<< Last week’s software sales chart

Last week, Capcom released DmC Devil May Cry in Japan, and the game sold 110,429 copies in its first week on the PlayStation 3. That’s a fair bit lower than Devil May Cry 4, which was released in 2008 and sold 205,390 copies on PS3 at launch.

There are probably a couple of reasons for the difference in sales. For starters, Devil May Cry 4 had a PlayStation 3 hardware bundle, which DmC did not. Additionally, Devil May Cry 4 also had the luxury of being the first game in the series that was being developed for a new generation of consoles. Finally, DmC Devil May Cry is targeted at the western market, which likely played a role in the game’s Japanese sales as well.

Digimon Adventure was released last week as well. The game sold 47,807 copies in its first week, which is a far cry from Digimon World Re:Digitize’s debut last summer. That game sold 85,817 copies in its first week.

On the hardware front, Nintendo 3DS sales remained steady while Wii U and PlayStation Vita sales dropped again. Nintendo held a Nintendo Direct presentation to highlight in-progress Wii U software this morning, but since several of the titles highlighted during the presentation will not be available until at least later this year, the system’s sales will likely remain low until more software is introduced to the market.

Wii Fit U, slated for release in the first half of this year, may help, but whether or not it will catch on like its predecessor did remains to be seen.

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

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