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.

Yeah, people keep saying Japan sales are dropping off, but PS2 sales were only about half of NA or Europe as well. It's just a smaller market.

Now, when trying to determine what will or won't sell... That's a whole other kettle of fish.

Japan always has a lull in October and November

i agree with the idea of this thread, but the information is no good. The further you go back the more games with sales data are missing. Even for the PS2 i'm sure they are missing sales data for something like half of the games released in Japan. The best data is the most recent and it seems to cover almost all the games released.

the sales data for Japan goes back for ever I beleive. The US and Others are incomplete.

yea it goes back, but it's missing loads of games.

even some of the recent ones are missing games here and there.

hmm, are they major games? if not won't have to much effect

if you look back in like 1991 there is like 14 games on the chart. Obviously if you go to the game store there was probably hundreds of games. For the SNES days they are missing the majority of the games, even many games that sold well. The ones missing in the more recent charts are very minor such as the densha de go for wii. for the PS2 there is tons missing, because the software total for PS2 on vgchartz is only half of what Sony has been reporting. PS2 has so many games, many of them are region specific.

The data that they have is good, but it's missing loads of data. It's not ioi's fault, it's just impossible to find numbers for it.

oh, glad to know that, So I should assume if it is not from THIS generation it might be pretty weak? that sucks...