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Japanese Videogame Stats Illuminate, Confusticate

Posted by simoniker on from the so-many-numbers dept.

Thanks to Game Science for its article analyzing Japanese videogame hardware and software sales for the first half of 2004. Of particular interest are the hardware sales for consoles ("PlayStation 2 - 1,365,260... Nintendo Gamecube - 340,204... Xbox - 18,239"), million-selling games ("Pokemon Fire Red & Leaf Green - 2,136,737... Dragon Quest V - 1,572,497... Sengoku Musou - 1,002,312"), a rare Western game popular in Japan ("Grand Theft Auto Vice City - 367,302"), a list of the publishers with the most games in the Top 100 ("Nintendo - 28...Bandai - 9... Konami - 8"), and the note that "The [videogame] market has increased 7.7% on the same period last year", meaning previous depressed forecasts for the Japanese games industry might not be entirely correct.

2 of 27 comments (clear)

  1. Re:*Evil grin* by mwvdlee · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Couldn't resist the grin myself either, especially since the top 5 states even the old gameboy advance sells more units than the XBox!

    Realisticly though, western products rarely sell well in the far east. Xbox sells quite reasonably in the west, it has gained some reasonable marketshare though apparently not enough to gain a profit.

    I'll be laughing my ass off when MS releases their stripped-PowerMac-with-a-crappy-OS and pits it against Sony's revolutionary Cell-based design, though! :D

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  2. strange omission by MORTAR_COMBAT! · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Of particular interest are the hardware sales for consoles ("PlayStation 2 - 1,365,260... Nintendo Gamecube - 340,204... Xbox - 18,239"), million-selling games ("Pokemon Fire Red & Leaf Green - 2,136,737... Dragon Quest V - 1,572,497... Sengoku Musou - 1,002,312")

    The submitter's hardware list doesn't list the GBA SP which sold 1,295,460 units in the described time frame, and the GBA which sold 158,516, yet it does list a GBA game, Pokemon. Thus, the total GBA system sales were almost 90,000 units more than the PS2.

    What's even more interesting to me is that only the GBA SP and the GameCube sold more units in Q1/Q2 of 2004 than they did on Q3/Q4 of 2003.

    Oh yeah, that, and that the XBox did not have a single software title in the Top 100. PS2 had 50, GBA had 38, and the GameCube had 12.

    And one last bit: Pokemon Ruby/Sapphire sold its 5 millionth unit during the period.

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