This Week In Sales: The Debut Of Hatsune Miku and Future Stars: Project Mirai

Period: The week of March 5th – March 11th (2012)

Top-seller: One Piece: Pirate Warriors – 90,133

Nintendo 3DS sales: 68,951 | Total sales: 5,242,639

PlayStation Vita sales: 10,041 | Total sales: 610,062

Last week saw the release of Hatsune Miku and Future Stars: Project Mirai on the Nintendo 3DS, but despite being the strongest new release of the week, the game wasn’t strong enough to dethrone One Piece: Pirate Warriors, which — despite a massive drop in sales from its first week — hung on to the #1 spot for the second week in a row.

Sales of Project Mirai, however, weren’t as strong as one may have expected. The game sold 86,676 copies in its first week. Let’s compare that to the first week sales of the Project Diva series:

Hatsune Miku: Project Diva (2009) – 101,414

Hatsune Miku: Project Diva 2nd (2010) – 241,467

Hatsune Miku: Project Diva Extend (2011) – 184,673

Just why Project Mirai’s upfront sales are so much lower is hard to say, considering that the Vocaloid and Nendoroid brands themselves have been doing well. Perhaps it’s due to the lack of focus on certain features that were present in the Project Diva games, such as the Edit Mode, which would allow players to create and share their own customized performances. Unfortunately, it’s hard to say without any conclusive evidence.

Other 3DS games released during the week included Girls RPG: Cinderella Life, which did rather terribly at sub-10k in first-week sales. Metal Gear Solid: Snake Eater 3D did a little better at close to 40,000 sold, matching first week sales of Peace Walker HD.

Finally, Street Fighter X Tekken sold a mere 58,471 copies on the PlayStation 3 and 8,527 on the Xbox 360.

The complete top-20 software sales chart was as follows: