I've never seen the Japanese market this healthy in my entire life. The Nintendo DS can move software like no other.

I don't know why people blame first party games on Wii/DS. Quality games will sale regardless whether it's first, second or third party. (Most of the time, anyways)

I said it before & I'll say it many times again.

Without Japan, consoles no longer exist.

Without Japan, home consoles no longer exist.

Without Japan, handheld consoles no longer exist.

The Famicom, The Nintendo Entertainment System & 1985 kept gaming from being computer only.

It is because of Japan and specifically the Japanese company from Kyoto why consoles are still in production.

Because of this fact, the Japanese market will ALWAYS be important. No matter if other regions beat it in sales or not. The fact that the existence of this industry is tied to this land makes it all-important.

See Nintendo's DS & Wii, Sony's PS2 & PSP for details. The trends begin there and then spread out to the rest of the world.

The videogame business is a Japanese thing. Has been this way since 1985. America lost ruling claims to this business after the crash. Notice...no Microsoft handheld?

John Lucas

By your reckoning, the world should still cower in fear of the British Navy.

Japan is still important in many ways but its importance is changing and in some ways, dwindling. Talking it up for things that happened 20 years ago while ignoring the current situation is asinine.

 "The EU cannot in practice force any decision over a dissenting member." yes and no, the comission can rule a salty penalty for countries that do not follow the rules, the EU is more and more influantianal and powerful, the construction is not over and in the end we will finish to be like the USA with one president, etc. I'm sure of it. And VGC should consider europe as a single market for the sales data so that in the future when the EU is complete that would be easier to compare data from past to present. (ok it might take 20 years to complete the EU and become the USE).

"but it will never be one country."  I think it will, even though there still would be several languages unlike USA.

The Japanese and US market is a very important market not just in terms of number of sales but because of the numbers of developers. Japanese and US has the most important game developers. A console that have success in Japan will have most of Japanese developer support and that means a lot to the console game library. That is why I think that Japan and US market is more important than the Euro market because of developers support.

For you guys claiming Europe should be listed separately and using the US as an example -- you do realize that the US is not listed separately, right?

Japan still (and probably always) matters but I think it matters less because the the global gaming market is growing faster than the gaming market for Japan is growing.

This is a good thing in my eyes as Japan wont have as much influence in the gaming industry.  Japan is a very protectionist country (from cars to consoles) so for economics sake I'm glad to see the market shift more to America and Europe where people tend to buy products for quality or perception instead of nationality reasons.  I also prefer Western style games to Japanese style (except for Nintendo classics), so thats more good news for me.

I'd love to see the gaming market in Europe become even stronger.  Europe makes the best everything from cars to clothes so I'd like to see them make a serious attempt at the console market (Phillip's horride attempt doesnt count, I think there Belgium off the top of my head).  In my dream gaming world there would be Microsoft, Nintendo, and some European gaming console and hopefully by then I'll have enough expendable income to splurge on all three.