This Week In Sales: Kingdom Hearts 3D Drops Onto 3DS

Period: The week of March 26th – April 1st (2012)

Top-seller: Kingdom Hearts 3D: Dream Drop Distance – 213,579

Nintendo 3DS sales: 121,921 | Total sales: 5,522,588

PlayStation Vita sales: 12,105 | Total sales: 642,490

Kingdom Hearts 3D: Dream Drop Distance finally hit Japan last week, and sold a surprisingly low number of copies: 213,579 to be precise. For the sake of comparison, here’s what Kingdom Hearts’ first-week sales looked like on the Nintendo DS and PSP:

Kingdom Hearts 358/2 Days (DS): 295,205

Kingdom Hearts: Birth by Sleep (PSP): 445,962

As you can see, Kingdom Hearts 3D debuted a fair bit lower than both games. One of the reasons for this is most certainly that the Nintendo 3DS userbase is nowhere near as large in size as the DS and PSP userbases were when 358/2 and Birth by Sleep were released.

This is reflected in the fact that PSP sales only saw an increase of 12,000 units during the week that Kingdom Hearts: Birth by Sleep was released in 2010, meaning that most people who wanted the game already owned the device. By comparison, 3DS sales jumped from 94,000 to 122,000 for Kingdom Hearts 3D, meaning that a lot more Kingdom Hearts fans had to buy a new device this time around.

Another possibility is that Kingdom Hearts fans are starting to outgrow the series, and since the long-running story isn’t very easy to keep up with at this point, picking up new fans is a bit of a difficult prospect. Perhaps it’s time for Square Enix to get Kingdom Hearts 3 over with, and reboot the series like they’ve suggested, in order to preserve its long-term viability.

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