As we all know, any truely epic game such as Halo 3 in North America, Blue Dragon in Japan and Gran Turismo everywhere can move significant numbers of consoles. However, one normally expects very good and very hyped games to move a significant number of consoles as well.
In Japan this has been happening with the release of moderately big games for the Wii and PS3 (though not to the extent Nintendo and Sony would like), but it has not been happening in any major way for the Xbox 360. I have long theorised, and indeed mentioned numerous times on these forums, that this is due to an insufficient library of "average" games for the Japanese market on the Xbox 360 console. What I mean is that for a fairly good game to garner significant console sales, potential buyers must know that they can get a number of other decent games they will like for the system.
Microsoft has been working hard to garner a 'critical mass' of decent games for their console in the Japanese market, but to this day no game outside of launch titles, DOA4 and Blue Dragon have moved large numbers of systems. These games do not count as they clearly count as massive titles in Japan. However last week Ace Combat 6 sold upwards of 60,000 units and moved 16-17,000 units of hardware. As fantastic as AC6 is, it has never been a system-seller (on a large scale) in any market throughout the franchise's history, even on the far greater PS2 userbase. So now the question needs to be asked. Has the slowly but steadily increasing library of marketable Xbox 360 titles in Japan finally reached the critical mass where a great, but not massive title can sell large numbers of hardware?
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