Last month we reported that the Sony PlayStation 3 had outsold the Nintendo Wii in Japan for the month of March, marking the first time in 16 months that the Wii wasn’t the top seller in the region.
According to new data figures from Enterbrain for April, the PS3 has done it again, outselling its rivals for the second month in a row.
For the month of April, Sony sold 108,530 units, with Nintendo moving just 67,116 Wii units.
The console was given a boost thanks to the movie Final Fantasy VII Advent Children Complete and the release of a playable Final Fantasy XIII demo.
Result for: nits
Nintendo has come out to defend the sales figures for Grand Theft Auto: Chinatown Wars, released recently for the Nintendo DS portable platform. The sales figures for March were met with disappointment from analysts and many in the industry who expected the game to be incredibly successful like everything else in the GTA series. Nintendo has responded however, saying that the sales are “in line” with other AAA DS titles.
Steve Singer, vice president of licensing for Nintendo of America, said that the 89,000 units sold of the game was about standard for a successful third-party title on the platform, referring to Call of Duty 4’s DS version which sold 36,000 units in its first month. GTA: Chinatown Wars was predicted initially by analysts to sell 2 million units this year.
Result for: nits
Nintendo president Satoru Iwata has announced during his GDC keynote address that a new Wii firmware update will allow gamers to run Virtual Console games straight from their SD cards, sidestepping the need for the company to release an external hard drive.
The new Wii System Menu 4.0 will allow gamers to save and load games directly from SD cards, which at 32GB can hold up to 240 games.
During the same speech, Iwata noted that the Wii had finally passes the 50 million units sold mark, making it the fastest console to hit the milestone.
Additionally, Iwata added that the DSi has sold over 2 million units since its release last year in Japan.
