I know it appears to be standard practice everywhere, but what is going on with the 'Others' region.  It's the biggest region!  Lumping the majority of sales into one region called others just seems weird.

Showing Japan sales separately is quite interesting as it's home ground for Sony and Nintendo, America the same goes for MS, but it's also a big enough market to stand on it's own.  But why isn't Europe made into a region?

I think it's because the sales figures for non-Europe Others aren't accurate enough on their own to be separate.

The UK is a bigger market than Japan, but leaving just the UK out of Others would be a problem.

Because having 3 regions is easier than 4... I am not sure, but the expansion of "others" has been rapid, and it was not like this in the past

Others should be split into 3 regions, IMO: Europe, Middle East and Asia Pacific.

Hopefully we'll one day track Africa sales as well, when that continent lives up to its incredible potential.

The problem is the sales figures in a lot of those regions are harder to track and really arent that big. It just makes it easier to lump them together.

But you're thinking about it backwards. The reason Other has the highest portion of sales is because it's all the odds and ends. If you split it up, you'd realise that it's Europe and then 10 weird regions that produce tiny sales.

Maybe Europe could be split off so we have Americas, Japan, Europe, and Others, but then neither of them would be significant really.

I really like the three region system. Traditionally games have been produced in either the United States or Japan, with a few coming out of France and England. 'Other' is a nice way of examining how impartial observers react to both styles, and because it's so broad they have the numbers to make it seem relevant. Nobody cares if the PS3 sells 92 units in Bangladesh, but they care if it sells 30,000 in Others.

I think that it should be devided into Asia Europe America Other

It would make more sence and i think there would be enough sales in Latin America Africa Australia and a few other places.

It's probably just based off of Nintendo's regions; "Japan", "Americas", and "Other". Sony and Microsoft are similar. For Sony Europe is part of PAL Territories which includes Middle East, Africa, South Asia, and Australasia. For Microsoft Europe is part of EMEA which also includes Middle East and Africa.

Do you know how big Others is, excluding Europe? (Hardware)

Total sales so far this gen: ~ 15M.

So far this gen, there have been sold 236M hardware.

Splitting it up, this would be the regional split.

Americas: 93M (39.4%)

Europe: ~ 78M (33%)

Japan: 49M (20.7%)

Others: 15M - (6.35%)

Would that be any better? One region would be 1/6 size of another, and 1/3 of the second smallest...

No, that wouldn't work.

What could be done, was making a

Americas:

Europe:

Others:

As that would make a 40-33-27 split, which is decent. Still, not a huge improvement over the current 39-39-21 split

Oh, and as a side note - Americas is still the biggest market - just look at software.