Slashdot Mirror
Nintendo Holds 20 Best Selling Games in Japan
moderatorrater writes "Nintendo's dominance of the Japanese sales charts continues, as Gamasutra reports on the top games for Japan's 'Golden Week' celebration. The top 21 titles sold in the country were all on Nintendo formats; most actually developed by Nintendo itself. FFXII: Revenant Wings topped the list at number one, and along with five other DS or Wii titles was the only sign of third-party competition in the Japanese best-sellers market. 'With the holiday period functioning somewhat like the Christmas period in the West, there were no new entries in the top thirty - although a number of family friendly titles did reappear in the top ten, with Yoshi's Island DS at number four with 58,948 units sold. New Super Mario Bros. on DS re-emerged at number eight with 51,681 units sold, with the second Brain Training game at number ten.'"
It's almost like we're in the eighties again. Nintendo is no longer the snobish monopolist with kiddy games, like they were in the nineties, but back to having the first choice console for families.
MS is a bit like Sega, trying to be hip but falling at it. While Sony is NeoGeo, first choice for the gaming snobs.
The only one missing is Atari: the clueless blundering money-grubbing fools with a few good ideas.
Wii sports is not a pack-in in Japan, so those people actually bought the game.
I think this just goes to show that Nintendo is teetering on the precipice if insignificance and failure. With this many sales, it's clear that they will quickly saturate the market and everyone will own all the Nintendo games they can possibly buy. Then we'll see the
true market situation as gamers looking to spend their hard earned money have to go out and by products from Microsoft and Sony just to be able to keep playing new games!!!
Golden Week isn't a gift giving holiday. It's a chance to travel somewhere. So, sales of games are actually pretty flat during GW. The big gift giving holiday is (sort of) New Years. At New Years, kids get money from their relatives, then they go out to the stores and blow it on toys. That's as close as Japan has to our holiday rush.
Well, this is not exactly true. The big *gift-giving* holiday is actually Christmas, just as it is here - yes, they do celebrate it as a consumer holiday. And yes, they do have a pre-Christmas holiday rush there. The difference is it is not a *family* holiday. That's New Year's. Christmas is a holiday for couples, which actually makes it really big in the video game market, because all those girlfriends go out and buy games for their boyfriends, and now with the DS, boyfriends can do the same for their girlfriends (ditto for husbands/wives, but it's still younger people that spend the most on games).
The post-New Year's week's sales are usually big too for the reason you mentioned, but all of December is huge because of Christmas. The DS sold like 2 million units alone last December, if I remember right.
Golden Week is *usually* bigger than the weeks surrounding it strictly for the reason that a lot of people have that whole week off, so they buy games to play. It's not Christmas or New Year's big, but it's still usually bigger than most weeks.
This year seems to have been fairly slow, actually, which makes it sort of strange to see the numbers being called out in western news, as if there's something noteworthy about them.
How, exactly, is publishing a game on the same platform considered "competition"?
I don't know about the rest of you guys, but when I browse the games section (either at a store or on a website), I look at anything that I want to buy, then decide to buy it. I don't buy games one-at-a-time unless there's only one worthwhile game for sale when I'm looking. When I finish with the games I've purchased (either finish them or get bored with them), then I go buy more. So unless you're (as a hypothetical developer/publisher) releasing shitty "shovelware" games, there's an equal likelihood that I'll buy your game along with Nintendo's. It's not an either/or proposition.
On the flip side of things, I will not be buying a PS3 or an Xbox 360, therefore if you publish titles on anything other than the Wii, you will lose a potential sale to me. (I happen to be a Nintendo fanboy. If you prefer to be a Sony or MS fanboy, rearrange the names of the consoles in that last sentence. If you're willing to shell out for multiple platforms, ignore it entirely. It still holds true for a significant number of players, though.)
Nintendo's problems with 3rd parties seem to be manufactured by the gaming press and by anti-Nintendo fanboy-lunatics (not just fans, but the retarded fight-to-the-death fanboys. a.k.a. "Rabid Fanboys"). A true businessman in the game publishing industry would be smart to look beyond that hype.