I hear alot of people complaining that nothing sells in Japan anymore, and I beleived them. But today I decided to look at past sales using the tools availible here on this site.
If you go back to Pre-DS days in 2004 the average software sales for a Normal(not a week DQ or FF was launching) week say like in March or June was about 600k some weeks up to 700k or so, some weeks less. I decided to look through almost every week there year and most weeks at the slow times of year were about 1.1-1.2 million, it may have dipped under 1 million a couple of time. And to figure in that 2007 was a transition year with the PS2 fazing out and Wii and PS3 coming in, I was pleasently suprised.
If you go back to the "glory" days of Jananese gaming back in the PSX and SNES days the week were 800k to 900k. The Japanese market has grown much today. I think the reason the people see the Japanese market as falling because of the Rapid expansion of the US market. Japan had more market saturation for Videogames so it will grow slower- Europe is even less saturated than the US, I believe the combination of PS3 and Wii will expand Europe greatly over the next few years.
08 should be massive in Japan the Wii Userbase is expanding rapidly and PS3 seems to be throwing off its shackles ever so slowly. I think one thing people need to realize is that in Japan games are either Super Front heavy like FF and DQ and Pokemon or all legs, there seems to be little in between. The only games that consistenly have strong openings in Japan and legs are mario games(NSMB, SMG) but the opening are not MASSIVE just very very good. (900k for NSMB and 250k for SMG).
All this to say that I believe that Japan is still relevant. during the slow months the software sales totals are about 55% of the US's which is pretty good consider that the US is about 3-4 times larger(including canada since the charts do)
correction- during the height of the PSX sale were about the same.
psn- tokila
add me, the more the merrier.
