Yeah well I can understand your irritation with it.  I'm constantly frustrated with the lack of knowledge that my fellow countrymen (ie: leaders) have about the rest of the world.  People that aren't complete clowns know that Central America is just a label for a portion of North America.

I went to HK before and they are selling alot of Jap Wii. In Singapore and Malaysia, many shops sell Jap Wii also. These Wiis come from Japan, obviously. I think Famitsu and Media Create include these sales as well, if they have distributors' data. So Hong Kong's and South-East Asia's data could be partially in Japan data.

Singapore's local Wii is actually US Wii brought in by an official Nintendo distributor. So we could be contributing to America's data as well.

So why on earth do you call it North America?

Oh yeah, south america is insignificant. Try explaining that to all our members from that part of the world. 

It's fine to call central America that if you wish, in the same way I can call Japan+Korea+Thailand etc East Asia, but that doesn't mean East Asia is it's own continent... you can generalise areas however you want, but in terms of what countries are in which continent, officially all of what you call central America is part of the North American continent.

I think you could argue that geographically the Panama canal is the line between N.A and S.A, but politically all of Panama is in N.A.
There are other geographical splits that I don't think line up exactly with political boundries, for instance part of Egypt is really in Asia.

I think there are only two countries that are split between continent politically though, those being Russia and Kazakstan, at least according to a map i used to have on my wall (up to date for 2003) both those countries seem to be part European and part Asian.

Is Korea included in Others? It doesn't look like it.

Faxandu, I don't think you understand his point. In south America a lot of consoles are imported unofficially. These consoles are bought from retailers in US and therefore show up in NPD data etc as sales, but won't count as South American sales, even though they are sold to consumers in South America.

The situation is similar here in Thailand, PS3s are imported from Hong Kong, so all are sales will be tracked to Hong Kong until it's officially released here. 360s come from Korea, so Korea gets Thailand's sales attributed to them. I made a mistake earlier, I don't think Wii has been released in Hong Kong yet, so the majority of them come from Japan, but a minority come from US, so all those countries get consoles which were sold in other countries attributed to them.

This is the point he was making about South America, the majority of sales are grey imports, so are already tracked in US and not South America. The sales of official 360s and Wiis (PS3 hasn't been released in that territory yet) are probably a lot lower than cheaper grey imports. Official imports have to pay import tax, well connected importers don't, at least that's how it is here in SE Asia, and from my trips to South America I don't see much difference between the two regions. Corruption is king.

I'd really like to see 360 and Wii software sales in South America, my guess is the attach rate is close to zero. PS3 won't launch there until the hardware is profitable, as it's impossible to cover hardware losses with software sales.

PS1 and PS2 launched within a year of Japan here in Thailand, this time it's well over a year and they still have no plans to release the PS3 yet, but PSP has been out long time already as the hardware turns a profit. For those interested in when the PS3 hardware will turn a profit, an easy way to tell will be when it's released in either Malaysia/Thailand/South America. This is why Wii will launch in China ahead of PS3, whilst Nintendo never paid any interest before, and Sony always launched there alone.

If this hasnt been said yet...


They should make numbers for every country on earth!

Ppl in Cameroon are feeling real left out :(

oh right, sorry. so someone paying for and owning a console in south america will be very happy that the sale is registered here as north american. especially since the USA is so adored in that part of the world.

Can it actually be even more misleading to name sales "North America", by the assumption of many meaning pretty much USA, but then actually covering all of america with it? Very good for a website trying to be as accurate as posible with the sales data. 

ah, just checked the frontpage. there it says "America". with a flag of the USA right next to it. LoL.

so america = USA = USA sales? or is it just that the US owns all of America in any case?

a bit of conciseness wouldnt hurt.

I agree the US flag should not be put on the America chart (similarly the European flag does not actually cover Australia/other, or some of the European countries that are not part of the EU)

America = America, as in all of the Americas (2 continents)... the only thing wrong is the flag... but I cannot think of an image to put there instead, perhaps a tiny image of the continents?