Why does it matter if people import? It still counts towards the UK market 0_o bit of a weak retort.

+1 The UK market is over-rated by exports thanks to good prices/exchange rates, but by how much ? I never bought in UK (I'm French) but I hear that a lot of people on VG site forums by in the UK...

To compare JP/UK :
HW :
Home consoles : same size
Portables : Japan = 3xUK
Total HW : Japan = 2xUK

SW :
... I'm lazy, but UK buy more games per console.

Bigger, because per head of population they buy more software or hardware?

Thats a strange way of ranking things, So Any country that sells more software per head of population than the US is a bigger than them make me wonder what is truly the biggest software/hardware country in the world?

kowenicki is implying the US is not the biggest country in the world for software hardware, so what according to him is?

Can anyone answer this?

Not agreeing with Kowens interpretation, but that still puts US first (above UK and Japan at least) as it's 5 times bigger than the UK yet per head US is ahead (360 8m in US this year vs 1.5m in UK, PS3 5m in US vs 1m in UK)

Because it makes no sense to compare per capita values between UK and Japan when a substantial part of UK game sales go to mainland Europe. If you're trying to compare absolute numbers then that's alright, but throwing population sizes into the mix, is when it gets iffy.

I was actually wondering what part of the UK vg market is export for a while now, since I import roughly 50% of my game puchases from the UK. For most of my friends the quota is even higher, because they have credit cards (still unusual in Germany) to get better deals. I'm looking into getting a CC myself right now - just to buy games.

I know that my personal experience holds no real value when looking at the whole market. I doubt that casual gamers import games at all and I have no clue how the situation is in other EU countries, but given the discrepancy in price between the UK and any other EU country I highly doubt it's much different. That's why I would be interested in some real numbers - so if anybody has solid data, please share.

Considering Japan has a population of 128 million and UK has a population of 60 million which makes the U.K. population only 47% of the Japan population and is still roughly 75% as big as the Japanese market. Considering how bad the U.K. market is crashing and how close the GDP per capita is for each is so close I'm really amazed how close these markets are together.

No one imports from Kapan

ahaha