Japan Charts: Winning Eleven 8 drives sales past million unit mark

The Japanese leisure software market has rocketed past the one million unit sales mark for the first time since the end of May, thanks to the launch of Konami's Winning Eleven 8, a number one debut with sales of almost 700,000 units.

While that sales figure, recorded by market research firm Media Create, is substantially lower than Konami's own claim of a million units sold in the title's first day on sale (which seems likely to be a shipment figure, not a sales figure), it's still well ahead of the 642,000 units sold by Winning Eleven 7 in the same period.

It also represents over half of the total sales of leisure software last week - with the overall sales from the top 100 titles hitting 1.35 million units, a rise of over 50 per cent compared with last week's sales figures.

British gamers will have a chance to get their hands on Pro Evolution Soccer 4, which shares much common code with Winning Eleven 8, at the Game Stars Live consumer show in London at the start of next month.

Although a number of other new titles were also released during the week, none of them had anything approaching the impact of Konami's football juggernaut. Nintendo's Legendary Stafy 3 on the GBA came in at number two, with sales of around 42,000 units, and the only other new release to breach the top ten was Sony's PS2 online title SOCOM II: US Navy SEALs, which dropped in at number nine.

The remainder of the chart showed the top titles from the past month continuing to perform strongly - with Nintendo's Paper Mario RPG (Cube) at number three, Square Enix' Final Fantasy I and II Advance (GBA) at number four, and Konami's Jikkyo Power Pro Baseball 11 (PS2) at number five.

In hardware terms, the PS2 took the top spot in the market share rankings, with almost 48 per cent, leading the GBA on 43 per cent and the GameCube on 9.5 per cent. It's a sign of how wide the PS2 installed base is that the launch of a major title such as Winning Eleven 8 didn't drive that figure higher, with few consumers purchasing new PS2s in order to play the game.