Animal Crossing helps push 3DS sales past 10m in Japan

The popularity of Nintendo’s 3DS in Japan shows no signs of abating with the device having now sold over 10m units in the territory.

The release of Animal Crossing: New Leaf helped the handheld to sales of over 400k units in the final week of December alone. The machine hits the milestone in 98 weeks – although that’s significantly slower than the 61 weeks it took DS to reach the same milestone.

Nintendo dominated Japan’s hardware sales charts last week claiming the top three spots with the 3DS XL (156k), 3DS (123k) and Wii U (67k), with sales of the latter tracking significantly better than they are in the UK.

PS3 was the next closest machine with weekly sales of 64k followed by PSP (54k), Vita (33k), Wii (6k) and Xbox 360 (2k).

Nintendo was equally dominant in the software charts, claiming the top five in its entirety. 17 of the top 20 games were for Nintendo machines.