The PS4 is in its death throes in Japan while facing down against the Wii U in a head-to-head battle, now that Nintendo is whipping out the big guns.
Media Create sales data has come piling in for the week ending on June 1st, and it's not good news for the PlayStation 4.
Gematsu translated a report from 4Gamer.net, which listed the Media Create sales between May 25th and June 1st.
What did the report indicate? Well, the Wii U was the top selling console of last week, moving a massive 19,312 SKUs in Japan alone. I would imagine similar numbers in both the U.S., and U.K., markets, too. If I had to hazard a rough guess about total console sales, between 111,000 and 119,000 wouldn't seem too far fetched for the Wii U in the past week.
The Wii U also topped the charts on the software side, with Mario Kart 8 leading the top 20 game sales chart with a massive 325,892 SKUs sold, part of the 1.2 million worldwide recorded sales of the new-gen kart racer.
The PlayStation 4? Well, it only managed 6,508 units in the past week, getting beat out by the PlayStation 3 by more than 400 SKUs. Both PlayStation home consoles are also down from the prior week, where the Wii U still dominated Sony's platforms in the home console space.
What's more is that you can see where the Wii U ranks with the listing below. Read it, watch it, digest it and weep.
Even more than that, according to a little history lesson from GimmieGimmieGames.com, the PlayStation 4 is historically trailing the sales of the Wii U in Japan within the same sales window of its first year on the market. And we all know the Wii U had abysmal sales following its holiday launch in 2012, with a terrible first two quarters of 2013.
If the PS4 is trailing the Wii U's first year out, then that spells a far worse omen than Mario Kart 8 boosting the Wii U's hardware sales to 666%.
In fact, I would venture to say that the PS4 and Wii U in Japan seem to be mirroring the PS3 versus Wii in Japan, with Nintendo dominating the sales charts while Sony cried tears of sadness over the PS3's first two years of epic floppage.
Right now the PS4 has no software making big waves in Japan; and obviously the Japanese have no interest in the PS4's marketable hype that was generated against Microsoft's anti-consumer DRM policies that were originally introduced for the Xbox One.
What we have is the PS4 dominating in North America and the EMEA markets based on hype, but doing rather poorly in Japan with just over half a million units working as the install base. This means that the Japanese aren't easily won over by Antonio Banderas memes like NeoGaf, and they certainly aren't thrilled with clever marketing ads and jabs at the Xbox One to compel them to drop some Yen on Sony's latest console.
Nevertheless, if the Wii U keeps up its sales momentum it's not unlikely that Nintendo could take Japan this generation.
A lot of the future of Japan's interests in both consoles rests on what's unveiled at E3 and, subsequently, the Tokyo Game Show.
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