Quick question:
I noticed that the French charts on this site shows that French people prefer colorful/light hearted games like yokai watch, pokemon etc. more so than their other western counterparts (USA, Germany and especially the Uk).
And they also seem to have a great(er) affinity for Nintendo games and hardware and also Anime games or to be more specific: japanese games.
My question is: Why is that? I ask purely out of curiousity especially because their taste for gaming is the one I can affiliate the most with when looking at the individiual chart on this site.
Any French people here who have more insight on this or even a cultural backround for this?

Well. I'm French and I do not see French gaming tastes any different than let's say Germany or USA or Canada (where I live now).
Of course Nintendo has always been big for me while growing up, same goes with mangas (esp. comics on TV, I watched those like crazy).

Let's see, for 2016, there's the 2 version of FIFA, Battlefield 1, Uncharted 4, Call of a Duty, GTAV, The Division - seems no different than other countries.

I don't know, but when I went to France to study for three months the only game that my host family played was Age of Empires II. They didn't play anything else.

Yes I did, but I wasn't very good at it! It's also kind of interesting considering that I went in 2015, so the game would already have been pretty old by then.

Of course they have their western games otherwise it would be another Japan :P
Let's look at the games I was referinmg to: Yokai Watch 11th best selling game in France and #39 in Germany and #83 in the Uk and Anime games like Naruto and DragonBall sold in France significally more than in other Western countries heck even more than in Japan itself now that I'm looking at the numbers.
And as for Nintendo: I mean pretty much every Nintendo game sells the most in France out of Europe and the Switch launch beat the PS4 launch in France which I find mind boggling since the PS4 is considered the most hyped console in recent years and add the bad taste the WiiU left in gamers and it still managed to be the fastest selling console there. I mean it isn't obvious at first glance hence why I just noticed it now in my many years following game sales on this site.

Even if you take a look at the big western rpg's like Fallout, TES and Mass Effect, while these games sold well in France they still sold proportionally less than their neighbouuring countries.
While JRPG's like Pokemon, Yokai Wathc, Final Fantasy, Dragon Quest etc. sold in France the most, heck FF15 sold in France faster than Fallout 4 which would be unheard of in other western countries.

I can confirm as Belgium has the same pop culture influences, at least the french speaking part (publishers group us with France)

Final Fantasy and Kingdom hearts are bigger hits here than in the rest of Europe, with maybe the exception of Germany. It's mainly due to the fact that a bunch of animes got purchased by a french television without checking their contents, and mistaking them for child oriented cartoons. As it was extremely cheap, they got a lot of exposition in the 80's.

With that said, anime/mangas taste from the french speaking community is pretty shitty and definitely different from Japan, which explains why some franchises will not make it out of japan for a while (Idolm@ster for example).

They are soft, that is why they surrendered in ww2.

Actually after reading you first post (we posted at the same time); I agree with what you are saying. Esp. with the animes and all that.
With that new perspective, I guess yes it is a bit different.