Sales for the Sony’s PlayStation 3 dropped below 10 thousand for the first time during the week of 7th to 13th of May according to Media Create, a video game sales tracking firm. Their latest sales report has the PS3 selling 8839 units for the week in Japan, its lowest week of sales to date. Meanwhile, Square Enix’s latest game for the PSP, Final Fantasy Tactics: The Lion War took the top spot on the software chart, selling a solid 150 thousand copies in the week.

The week after the Golden Week period in Japan is one of the slowest weeks of the year for video game sales. This is reflected in a big drop for most hardware, the exception being the PSP with only a very small drop in sales of around 800 units to 34.4 thousand, and even more obviously in the software chart, with games like Final Fantasy XII: Revenant Wings falling from 109 thousand copies sold last week to 38 thousand this week, and Wii Sports falling from 85 thousand to 30 thousand.

The game at position 10 this week, Yoshi’s Island DS, sold just 17 thousand copies compared with the tenth placed game of last week, Brain Training 2, selling 44 thousand copies. The port of Final Fantasy Tactics to the PSP was also the only new release of significance - in fact the top 10 contains the same games as last week but for Final Fantasy Tactics replacing Mario vs Donkey Kong 2: March of the Minis.

The coming week’s charts will show the first sales figures of Nintendo’s Ouendan! 2 on the DS, Sega’s Shining Wind on PS2 and Atlus’ Odin Sphere on PS2, all likely to chart in the top 10.

Hardware Chart

Software Chart

Upcoming Titles

Special thanks to: Play-asia.com, NeoGAF and Google for the translations of Japanese game titles