Legend11 said:
FishyJoe said:
I posted these numbers on theSource's Japan preview, but I thought it's worthy of its own thread. Adding up the weekly numbers for all consoles, Wii+360+PS3+PS2: NA = 492k
Others = 292k (UK = 73k)
Japan = 111k These numbers kind of shocked me at how bad the market in Japan has gotten. The UK could beat Japan soon. Holiday sales could literally swallow Japan. Right now Japan only represents 13% of the global market. With holiday sales, it could very well drop to below 10% of the global market, as Japan doesn't celebrate as much as the rest of the world. |
The difference may grow even more in the future. With the exception of the UK the rest of Europe is pretty much underdeveloperd when it comes to consoles. A lot more next generation consoles have been sold in Canada (pop: 33 million) for example than Germany (pop: 82 million). Also both Canada and the U.S. have positive population growth rates (both at around 0.8% per year) while Japan's is negative (-0.088%). In ten years Canada and the U.S. combined will have 30 million more people added while Japan will have lost 1.1 million. I really do think we're heading for a time when videogames will mirror movies and it will get increasingly more difficult for Japan to keep up simply because they won't have the population required to support big budget Japanese only games. We'll see more games that appeal to North American and European audiences because their populations will be required for big budget games to be profitable. |
disturbingly that makes a lot of sense, i hope this does not happen because the Japanese angle on games is what is keeping things interesting for me.....Maybe if the European market grows significantly there can be a new games focus that is neither Japanese or American...i would like that. though it might not work well with Europe being split up so much, I mean with the USA one game can target gamers scattered across the states, but a game that does well in Italy might not in Germany.
