I did some math recently with `violent western games`in Japan. Looking at sales of western games in Japan and analyzing the overall home console market in Japan, it appears that western gamers are more popular there than it may seem on the surface. The home console market in Japan is more than 4X smaller than in North America (that may change some with FF13). Taking that into account, CoD 4 selling 350k across Ps360 in Japan is equivalent to a Ps360 game selling 1.4m+ combined in North America. And GTA4 is even bigger than that. 420k across both plats in Japan. That`s equivalent to 1.7m+ combined in NA. That`s pretty damn f`n good. Considering how small the home console market is these days in Japan, `violent western games`are probably more popular than they ever were (Vice City sold 470k on the PS2 but home consoles were a lot more popular and the PS2 install base was huge).
I need to bring up this math whenever there is a discussion going on about `violent western games` in the Japanese market.
I could see how Square-Enix could be misled by the numbers. But if you crunch the numbers and analyze the situation in more depth, they should be pleased with how well Call of Duty 4 sold over there. Hopefully Modern Warfare 2 is going to top it over there. But after comments made by Square-Enix, they might dissuade a lot of Japanese gamers from buying the game. These western software figures in Japan also give hope for Microsoft`s efforts in Japan.
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