This Week In Sales: Pikmin 2 (!) Makes A Comeback

Period: The week of August 12th – August 18th (2013)

Top-seller: Disney Magic Castle: My Happy Life – 41,679

Nintendo 3DS sales: 23,992 | Total sales: 8,510,418

Nintendo 3DS XL sales: 47,005 | Total sales: 3,608,823

PlayStation Vita sales: 19,363 | Total sales: 1,796,491

Wii U sales: 12,047 | Total sales: 1,048,426

<< Last week’s software sales chart

Last week, Japan celebrated Obon—a festival where one celebrates their ancestors. While not listed as a public holiday, Obon usually involves customary leave, and because of this, the holiday effect was in full swing last week, boosting hardware sales across the board, as well as the sales of popular software.

This was most prominent in the case of the Nintendo 3DS, with the top-ten software sales chart consisting almost entirely of Nintendo 3DS games from various publishers. Namco Bandai’s Disney Magic Castle took the top spot for the week once again, with other recent popular releases like Ace Attorney: Dual Destinies still going strong.

In particular, Level 5’s Youkai Watch has managed to sell relatively consistently these past few weeks. While not a huge breakout hit, the game has sold around 135,000 copies since launch and looks like one of those games that will enjoy a long tail.

Also worth pointing out is that it looks like Nintendo have shipped new copies of New Play Control! Pikmin 2 for Wii, to coincide with Pikmin 3. The Wii port of Pikmin 2 was at the #31 spot two weeks ago, but the holiday effect pushed it into the top-20 last week.

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

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