Dragon Ball Kai: Ultimate Butōden was released for the Nintendo DS in Japan exactly one week ago, and the sales are in. In its first week of release (reporting from January 31st to February 6th), the game moved 31,108 copies, making it the fourth-best performing game of the week.
As a bit of comparison in the portable arena:
- Dragon Ball DS sold approximately 70-80,000 copies its first week in Japan back in 2008
- Dragon Ball Kai: Saiya-jin Raishū (also for the DS) did 73,915 copies its first week in 2009
- Dragon Ball DS 2 moved 17,494 copies its first week in 2010
- Dragon Ball: TAG VS on the PSP sold 19,080 copies its first week in 2010
Sales figures are all over the place when you compare portable to console games, but at the end of the day, there is an exponential downward trend going on — so much, in fact, that no Dragon Ball games were reported on Namco-Bandai’s most recent quarterly figures, the first time in a while during their release window.
Dragon Ball Kai: Ultimate Butōden has still not been announced for distribution outside Japan. We heard rumblings of Dragon Ball DS 2 coming stateside about two months after its Japanese release last year, which still leaves a window of opportunity here, even with the 3DS on the horizon. It is interesting to note, however, that Ultimate Butōden was not shown off in any capacity at Namco-Bandai’s recent “IGNITE” event in San Francisco last week, where other new announcements were made.