Japan Half-Year Sales Show Sony Domination

Posted by simoniker on Wednesday July 9, 2003 @10:58AM from the tokyo-state-of-mind dept.

Thanks to Polygon for posting the Japanese games industry's half-year console hardware and software stats on their site. They summarize: "Sales of Sony's PlayStation 2 console significantly outpaced all competitors... surprisingly, Square-Enix topped all software publishers by a large margin." As far as Japanese hardware sales go, the GameCube (8.3 percent) and especially Xbox (1.6 percent) are falling ever-further behind the Playstation 2 (58.5 percent.) Regarding software, Square Enix may not have expected Final Fantasy X-2 to sell almost 2 million copies, but it only boosted their already top-selling Japanese output. Nintendo's second place in software may be more due to their handheld output, not including (?) the separately-listed and top-selling Pokemon Ruby/Sapphire for GBA, rather than their GameCube titles (though some GC titles like Animal Crossing have been surprise hits.)

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Re:Are you really surprised about the X box? by Ty · 2003-07-09 12:23 · Score: 3, Insightful

This actually made me laugh and there's more truth to it than seems. Anyone who knows Japanese culture to any extent knows why the XBOX isn't selling well in Japan. It's a similar reason that SONY/NINTENDO can't break into the huge Korean gaming market.
Nintendo vs. Sony by CashCarSTAR · 2003-07-10 00:36 · Score: 3, Insightful

Nintendo, at this point will always be a bit-player in the console market. That is not necessarly a bad thing, it's just market reality.

Nobody wants to compete with Nintendo's first party games. They so dominate the system (in reality they dominate all the systems for the most part). No 3rd party games, equals no broad support.

Nintendo really is the Apple of the video game world business wise. Selling to a small group of people for a good profit.

On the other hand, I think that the PS2 has it's lead just because it was the first in. More consoles sold=more games=more consoles sold. Sure the games don't look quite as nice, but it's still spectacular enough.

It'll be interesting to see what happens for the next Generation. If Nintendo jumps on with a competitive All-in-one system, (GC 2, GC and GBA support) Quite frankly, they still could slug it out with Sony.