The newly released data from Media Create Co., a Japanese market tracking agency, claims that last week was not very good for new-generation game consoles in general and Sony PlayStation 3 in particular, as Sony Computer Entertainment Inc. sold over three times PS3 units less than Nintendo managed to sell its Wii game consoles in the domestic market of both.

According to the data released Friday, Nintendo Wii was acquired in 93.7 thousand quantities during the week ending January 14. At the same time, end-users acquired 25.5 thousand of PlayStation 3 consoles and about 9 thousand of Xbox 360 game machines during the same week in Japan. Estimates for a prior week were not supplied.

The numbers for PlayStation 3 and Wii game consoles are claimed to be the worst since the launch of the aforementioned products, whereas sales of Xbox 360 – also not particularly strong even for Japan – are said to be back to the levels before the game called “Blue Dragon” was launched in early December and offered as a bundle with the machine, IDG News-service claims.

Media Create takes sales data from around 3000 shops across Japan and extrapolates that into national sales estimates. It says it is confident of its figures.

This is far not the first time when market analysts estimate that Sony has problems with the demand towards its latest game console, it is also not the first time when Nintendo Wii outsells PlayStation and Xbox. However, this is the first time when Wii manages to outsell PlayStation 3 by the factor of 3.67, something, which again indicates that the demand towards Sony’s latest game console may be softening.

Earlier this week Sony said it had hit one million PS3 shipments milestone in Japan (which should include shipments to countries like South Korea and Taiwan) and, hence, over two million in the whole world. An analyst from Japan said at that time that demand towards the PlayStation 3 may be lowering, without providing exact figures, however. Moreover, a U.S.-based analyst also indicated this week that the demand towards PS3 may not be as high as before.

NPD Research, an independent market tracking agency, recently indicated that back in December there were shipped 1.132 million Xbox 360 game consoles, 604 thousand Nintendo Wii game machines and 490.7 thousand Sony PlayStation 3 much-anticipated game consoles in the USA. The same market tracking agency revealed earlier that in November end-users acquired 195 thousand PlayStation 3 machines. Thus, about 685 thousand of the PS3 game consoles were bought by end-users in calendar 2006, starting from November 17, or about 115 thousand a week. Meanwhile, Sony made available over 140 thousand of PS3s a week on average in the first seven weeks of sales in the USA. 

Media Create also recently revealed that during the whole 2006 there were sold 1.45 million PlayStation 2 game consoles, 919.6 thousand of Wii game machines, 457.5 thousand of PlayStation 3 consoles and 194.1 thousand of Xbox 360s. Compared to Sony’s shipments numbers of 1 million PS3s, the actual sales figures suggest that the demand for the PS3 is lagging behind even not very high supply.