lol. If you by 'soon' mean two or three decades.

The UK has gone from being relatively insignificant to us debating whether or not it is the second largest market in the space of a decade.

The UK is the largest market in Europe despite not having the largest population (Germany has).

The UK's market is constantly trending upwards, you never hear of people saying that the UK's market is dead, do you? Hell, look at this growth chart - http://i2.photobucket.com/albums/y24/konangrit/UKmarketevothroughsep08.jpg

Outside this current recession, the Pound tends to be very strong against the dollar, and the consoles are often much more expensive than in US, Japan - higher profits for the firms. Same goes for the actual software.

Due to the fact that the UK speaks English, there are no translation costs for American firms to release software here, unlike Japan. Lower costs = more profits.

One would imagine that advertising in the UK is also relatively cheap in the UK. After all, there's only 60 million people living here, and there's over 300 TV channels. Again, lower costs = higher profits.

With all this in mind, although the UK currently isn't second place in terms of marketshare (but it is growing, I believe) it's still second in terms of importance to the industry.

Even in output, where the Japan trumps allover the UK, the UK's importance is rapidly growing. Criterion, Rockstar, Media Molecule, and tonnes of others all are UK based - still nothing compared to Capcom, Konami, Nintendo and Co - but far more important than it used to be.

EDIT: I also recall reading something somewhere, where it said that the UK spent more money on games per person than any other country in the world. I haven't a source, atm, but I will try and find it.

UK was the 2nd largest market in Software Units last year.

Your hardware comparison is flawed as it includes January for Japan, but not for UK. UK sales are also skewed more towards the holidays than Japan, which these figures miss.

2008 hardware sales:

JP: 12.3m
UK: 9.3m

Good, I was getting sick of hearing all the Japan doom & gloom

But I thought Japan is irrelevant nowadays? A lot of people here is always saying it.

Japan has a bigger population than the UK and yet only smells small amounts more? WOW now that is a shock.

It is. Only if you include handhelds it's somewhat a relevant market. But for the three home consoles Japan has dropped to less than 10% of the worldwide sales in this gen, and for consoles software even less.

Take last weeks sales for example (June 20th). Worldwide total sales was 470,000 units of Wii, PS3 and X360, but only 34,000 of those were sold in Japan. That's just 7.2%.

Why is the French console market bigger than the German when Germany has a bigger populationa dn is a richer country?

Simply because Germany is a PC dominated market.

UK software units are so high because a lot of European countries import from there