Japan Half-Year Sales Show Sony Domination

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.)

Comments

Pokemon listed seperate

[Mike Hawk]

I notice Pokemon has a seperate listing in the software category. Is that 1.44 million already included in Nintendo's 3.15 total above? If so, that would seem to show a weakness in Nintendo's lineup outside of Pokemon. If not then all is as expected with Nintendo taking the top spot with a total of 4.59 million.

I'm not familiar with how Japanese totals are reported, I just found that listing interesting.

Re:Any titles coming up

[Anonymous Coward]

Yep, either Mario Kart, or perhaps Viewtiful Joe (assuming they fix some of the design "bugs" in the Japanese release). However, I don't know how many people will be playing 8-player Mario Karn when THE FARKING BROADBAND ADAPTER IS IMPOSSIBLE TO FIND IN THIS COUNTRY.