The 3DS may have won the hardware charts during the last week of tracked game sales in 2015, and it may have had the highest charting games, but the growth of the Japanese market in that period – a 120% increase over the same period in 2014 – comes primarily due to two platforms doing well, and adding to the the 3DS’s success with their own.
None of those platforms was the PS4, or even the Xbox One. Instead, it was the Wii U and PS Vita that led the rebound of the Japanese software market in week 52 of 2015, Media Create reports. The multiple Vita games that charted, while not performing particularly well on their own, had a cumulatively positive impact on software sales; meanwhile, on the Wii U front, the titanic performance of Splatoon and Super Mario Maker is what buoyed game sales up.
Of course, with most major first and third party support for the PS Vita winding down, and with Nintendo now shifting their focus to the Wii U successor NX, this was also probably the last Christmas that we saw the Vita and Wii U put on a good show- it’s probably all downhill from here. It’s a bit of a shame, because both machines had far more potential, and deserved far more and far better, than their ultimate fate, but the market has spoken.
At least they managed to go out on a high.