This Week In Sales: Ace Attorney Investigations 2 Prosecutes The Competition

If there’s one thing the week of January 31st – February 6th demonstrates, it’s the power of a brand and marketing, with Ace Attorney Investigations 2 topping the sales chart for the week at 132,000 units.

Ace Attorney Investigations:

For the sake of comparison, Capcom’s previous DS adventure game, Ghost Trick: Phantom Detective, debuted at a mere 24,000 units. The original Ace Attorney Investigations, however, sold a whopping 172,000 units in its first week.

In a recent Capcom media strategy report, the company revealed that it has been aggressively promoting the Ace Attorney franchise through various events in Japan, such as live plays, which have been attracting a broader, non-traditional audience (including women) to it.

As a result, sales of the original Ace Attorney Investigations were higher than expected, and character-based merchandise has been performing favourably as well. While Ace Attorney Investigations 2 debuted at lower figures than its predecessor, Capcom have recently stated that they plan to continue promoting the brand in the future as a mid-range franchise, along with Sengoku Basara.

Everything else:

Meanwhile, The Last Story dropped precipitously from #1 last week, all the way down to #7 this week, with a fraction of its first week sales. The same could be said for Valkyria Chronicles 3, down to #8 and facing more than its share of competition from other PSP games (six in the top-ten alone). Of all the games released last week, Kenka Bancho 5 appears to have had the best staying power, only dropping from #4 to #5.

The number of PSP games on the chart (twelve in total) is pretty astounding. As DS releases slow down and publishers move to the other viable portable platform, we’re seeing publishers like Namco Bandai put one PSP game out after another.

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

Sales data acquired from 4Gamer and Media-Create, with additional sales insights gathered from Geimin.net.