Fire Emblem: Awakening bolsters 3DS sales while PS Vita sales continue to slump

Nintendo posted its first annual loss this week, but the 3DS is still beating out the handheld competition in Japan.

The strong hardware sales of the Nintendo 3DS, which are up 33 per cent from last week, are due in no small part to the strong launch of Fire Emblem: Awakening.

The first Fire Emblem game for the 3DS sold 242,600 units in its first week making it the number one selling game in Japan.

The second most popular game, Code of Princess, is also a new 3DS title but sold only 19,554 copies.

Rounding out the rest of the top ten list of games were six other 3DS titles (including Monster Hunter 3G, Kid Icarus: Uprising, and Kingdom Hearts 3D – Dream Drop Distance), one PSP game (2nd Super Robot Wars Z) and Detective Conan: Prelude from the Past for the Nintendo DS.

Between April 16th and April 22nd, the Nintendo 3DS sold 84,760 units (up from 63,796) while sales of the Nintendo Wii were up slightly (from 6,837 to 7,025) as well.

Embarrassingly for Sony, sales of Nintendo’s 6-year-old Wii came very close to matching the total number of PS Vitas (8,206) sold during the same week.

Sales of Sony’s PSP were down 10 per cent from 13,166 to 11,779 but still managed to outsell the Vita by a significant margin.

With Golden Week (Japan's key holiday period) arriving in a matter of days, it is likely that software and hardware sales will pick up across the board in Japan, which should be good news for the industry as a whole.