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Forums - Sales Discussion - Asian Video Game Market

Kzin on 30 June 2007

Something has been bothering me about the Other Region - Other numbers.

The Other Other numbers are terribly small, about equal to Australia, so I started to do some research. I found 4 of the wealthier markets in Asia (Hong Kong, Singapore, Taiwan and South Korea) and compared them to a market of comparable size and wealth in Europe - Germany. The numbers for Other - Other are less than half of Germany's and yet should represent the rest of the worlds sales as well as these four markets.

Is the video game market in the Asian markets really this undeveloped?

Or are they all just playing Starcraft?

 

 

Country Population Date GDP (PPP) Date GDP Per Capita
Hong Kong 6,980,412 July 2007 est. $ 258,800,000,000 2006 est. $ 37,075.18
Singapore 4,553,009 July 2007 est. $ 141,200,000,000 2006 est. $ 31,012.46
Taiwan 22,858,872 July 2007 est. $ 680,500,000,000 2006 est. $ 29,769.62
Korea, South 49,044,790 July 2007 est. $ 1,196,000,000,000 2006 est. $ 24,385.87
Total 83,437,083   $ 2,276,500,000,000   $ 27,284.03
           
Germany 82,400,996 July 2007 est. $ 2,630,000,000,000 2006 est. $ 31,917.09

Figures from CIA World Factbook.

 

  Other - Other Germany
Console Weekly Total Weekly Total
DS 5,307 569,286 17,019 2,026,436
PSP 2,909 286,297 5,499 725,176
PS3 2,004 68,121 2,122 92,279
Wii 1,639 68,624 6,994 278,802
X360 1,471 153,250 1,840 288,168
Total 13,330 1,145,578 33,474 3,410,861


Figures from Other Regions section.

 

EDIT: Maybe MS should give Blizzard an incentive to finish Starcraft: Ghost to capture market share in Korea :P



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mrstickball on 30 June 2007

Most of these markets are indeed small. For X360, I believe that the total sales in all of those places is equal to X360's sales in Japan.



Back from the dead, I'm afraid.

Neos on 30 June 2007

yup, all playing starcraft/WoW/warcraft 3

they



Neos - "If I'm posting in this thread it's just for the lulz."
Tag by the one and only Fkusumot!

 

samho on 30 June 2007

Consider the fact that None of them have official Wii launch yet...

(Note: I'm from Taiwan)



Cursayer2 on 30 June 2007

Nintendo will launch there when their supply equals demand in the US, hopefully earlier.



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realist on 30 June 2007

What are you talking about? I'm from Singapore and the Wii certainly has launched here. It's readily available everywhere, but that's probably because it's so expensive. It's over 600 SGD, when the PS3 costs 800 (although the Wii ships with an extra controller and a game)



johnsobas on 30 June 2007

Most of that is Korea, and they generally don't buy consoles. They tend to go to places where they pay by the hour to play them, or they play PC games at home or go to arcades. Singapore and hong kong are wealthy, but tiny.



currently playing: Skyward Sword, Mario Sunshine, Xenoblade Chronicles X

superchunk on 30 June 2007

So the Singapore version has two complete controllers and wii sports?



Kzin on 30 June 2007

Well I did a little more digging and I found out that in Korea PS3 only launched June 16th, DS Launched in January, and Wii has not yet launched. Apparently DS is selling quite well in Korea according to this link. I also found this blog that was suggesting 270,000 DS sales since January, but it has not been confirmed.

I'm guessing from the realtively consistent weekly sales numbers for Others on this site (no spikes for the above mentioned launches) that Korea is not actually being tracked, but that the Others numbers are being extrapolated each week based on the regions that are easier to track (NA, Western EU and Japan.)



realist on 30 June 2007

I don't know. I'm not sure if the sign said "one extra controller" or "including one controller". I suppose I could check next time I pass by a store.