Some people seem to be confused about this years Japanese hardware sales in December so I thought I´d do a little comparism with previous years (2002 - 2007) so we can get answers to the following questions:

1) Is the Wii selling bad for the leading console in early December?

2) Are the PS3 sales great, bad or somewhere between?

3) Is the Japanese market really getting smaller or are we just confused because the DS sold that well during the last year?

Some people may be surprised. Here we go:

(note: I only took Playstation 2, GBA and Gamecube as the leading console, the leading handheld and the second console. Please compare PS2 with Wii, GBA with DS and Gamecube with PS3).

Here is the 2007 chart for the week ending 8th of December:

Console	Week	Weekly	Total
	158	168,478 (+31%)	20,597,667
	54	115,762 (+58%)	4,065,352
	157	86,343 (+11%)	7,209,815
	57	36,539 (-8%)	1,521,861

What can we see here? Some thoughts and facts:

- The DS beat every single year of the GBA this week as the leading handheld.

- The Wii sold 11k less than the PS2 in its best year for the 2nd week of December - additionally it outsold the PS2´s results for 2001 (not seen here), 2002 and 2004.

- The Playstation 3 sales are quite similar to the respective Gamecube sales during this week of the year. It oustold the Gamecube in 2002 and 2004 and sold nearly exactly the same number of units as the Cube in 2003. All in all PS3 sales are slightly above Gamecube average sales but we have to keep in mind the PS3 saw a drop in sales during the last two weeks because a new SKU was introduced.

- If we count DS and PSP together we have roughly 255k handhelds sold; that´s almost double the GBA´s 2002. It´s best year for the respective week.

- The PSP sold as good as the PS2 in 2003 and the GBA in 2002.

One last interesting tidbit: If we add together the hardware sales for all plattforms above 2,000 units we get a total of 430k consoles sold. For comparism: In 2002 the total sales across all plattforms were only 272k hardware units and about 220k for 2003. This means the market saw a nearly 100% growth since last generation.

Now it´s up to you to answer the questions I asked you above.

 Edit: I changed some things a bit.

Nobody interested?

I thought after all those comments about the Japanese market dying people would comment here...

Yea Louie, Ive notice I never get any response on my serious post... the only time you get decent responce is when you make a prediction or troll...

But good research there, I am very happy to see that the Wii is selling as well as the PS2 did on its best Christmas and than Japanese Hardware sells are strong...

What people are complaining about the most is the lack of good games selling out there... I personally believe they are, I just beleive that sales patterns have gone back to the way they were in the NES and SNES days in Japan, all legs, modest openings.

WHY OH WHY IS PSP doing well??

what are people buying for it..nothing as we can see from the charts...

 Huh? Was that sarcasm? 

it think it was, from what I can tell his a big PSP guy, would not call him a fanboy, but he favors Sony. He is fair most of the time though.

 Everybody I know here in the US who brought a PSP brought it because its so easy to pirate software for it. My neighbor hasn't brought a game for it since the first week he had it.

comparing specific weeks is pretty ridiculous since there are high fluctuations. If you take the xbox when halo comes out it will crush the ps2.

 it's pretty easy to pirate for the ds as well.  most of my friends do, i only don't because of moral objections.  i don't care what my friends say to try and defend their actions, pirated software is stealing.

how DS uses carts and it has no HD?