In the past days, there has been a lot of talk about the situation of Japanese video game companies. There was the interview with Hido Kojima where he said that the Japanese game industry was in trouble. There also was the opening conference of the TGS with Square Enix talking about the troubles that Japanese companies are having to compete with the west. BengaBenga made an interesting editorial talking about the state of RPGs in Japan as well as Square Enix's strategy. I was a bit curious about the Japanese market so I decided to see how Japanese developers are doing on our 3 current generation consoles so I made a list of all Japanese games that sold more than 400k copies. I also included games that were financed by a Japanese company but made by a western company such as Resistance or Metroid. Finally, I combined the sales of all multiplatform games but I did not include the PS2 sales.

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Interesting facts:

Nintendo: 20 games, 76,78m.

Sega: 13 games, 15,81m.

SCE: 10 games, 15,40m.

Capcom: 9 games, 9,41m.

Konami: 5 games, 9,27m.

Namco Bandai: 6 games, 4,82m.

Square Enix: 1 game, 0,71m.

Total: 69 games, 138,51m.

55,4% of all the games from Japan came from Nintendo.

There are only 3 RPGs in the list: Lost Odyssey, Dragon Quest Sword and Blue Dragon.

The best selling third party games are: Mario & Sonic at the Olympic Games, Pro Evolution Soccer 2008, Metal Gear Solid 4, Devil May Cry 4 and Lost Planet.

There are 40 Wii games, 37 exclusives and 19 of them first-party. That means that there are 17 third-party exclusives.There are 93,57 games sold on Wii (69,1% marketshare).

There are 25 PS3 games, 14 exclusives (10 first-party). There are 27,27 games sold on PS3 (20,2% marketshare).

There are 19 Xbox 360 games, 8 exclusives (all third-party if Mistwalker count as a third-party). There are 14,22 games sold on Xbox 360 (10,5% marketshare).

If we remove sales from first-party developers, we get:

As we can see from the table above, the marketshares for Japanese games are really similar to the consoles marketshares. The only difference is that the PS3 is slightly higher than it should be while the Wii is slightly lower. This means that the PS3 attach-rate is better than that of the Wii.

Well, that's it about the facts of the Japanese companies. Now, what would be interesting is to compare the companies to see if there really is a problem in the land of the rising sun.

What about Wii Sports? You can count only Japanese sales

WoW at nintendo. Simple as that

Oh yeah you're right... I'll update it.

EDIT: done. Nintendo now at 55,4% of all Japanese games.

Could you imagine if you included handheld games as well. It would be Nintendo overload. Not that it isn't already but even more so.

Yeah but at the same time, it's a bit scary. Nintendo is completely dominating the whole country. It shows a bit why Japanese developers seem to be afraid of the Wii. However, if you exclude the sales of Nintendo games, the Wii moves Japanese games very well. The Japanese developers that are doing the best are those that support all platforms.

wii will move franchises, dragon swords was an average spin off that sold very well. monster hunter numbers will be insane

True but Resident Evil 5 will sell extremely good as well. Capcom wins by supporting all platforms.

I predict RE5 will sell less than RE4 at least in Japan