Sibling Rivalry: Vita Outsells PSP for Second Time

The PlayStation Vita is only a few short weeks away from releasing in the United States, Europe, and Australia. But it’s been interesting to track the system’s sales progress in Japan since it was launched around the holidays of 2011. At the end of its seventh week of life, the Vita managed to get a little wind in its sales (HAR HAR), selling more units than last week and—for the first time since its launch, according to a Eurogamer post—outselling its older, cheaper brother, the PlayStation Portable (PSP).

The post shows that the system sold 18,842 units at the end of week 7, up from its week 6 sales of 15,219. The PSP’s course reversed, though, selling 16,008 this week, after having sold 17,181 last week. In addition to this being the first time the Vita outsold the PSP since its launch week, it’s also the second time the system’s sales have gone up since its previous week’s sales.

One of the reasons for the sales bump could be attributed to the software that was released in Japan that week, namely a game called Tales of Innocence R, an RPG remake from Namco Bandai that hit number three on the software sales charts from that week, with the 3DS’s Resident Evil: Revelations and PS3’s Armored Core 5 the only games to top it.

It proves something that revealed itself to be true during the 3DS’s launch: people want good games. It used to be that the slickness of the device itself would be allure enough to drive sales of new systems, but now that there are so many awesome, shiny gadgets to draw our attention, game systems need to have strong, desirable software to go along with it. Hopefully the Vita’s US and European launch line up will appeal more to those audiences and keep the system selling after its worldwide launch.

Who knows what’ll happen next week? Let’s hope the system can keep the upward momentum going leading up to its worldwide debut.

Via Eurogamer

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