wow, those 360 sales are only half of what they were before too, the PS3 is fortunate to not have as much of a drop, i think bladestorm helped.

What? I dont see anything on the PS3 release list that will come close to Mario Strikers Mario Galaxy and Brawl and Wiifit in Japan later this year. I mean PS3 has ZERO games that stand a remote chance of standing up to that lineup. The PS3's lineup in Japan for later this year is a non issue.

Truth be told game sales all around are nosediving in Japan, its just that not being there you dont realize/hear about it. After the holiday stuff is tanking. DQ:S took a nose dive. Hell Minna no Golf for PS3 started to fall off a cliff hard as hell, look:

Minna was going great for a while, we all saw the sales, it had legs so retailers kept ordering. Then after the holiday apparently game sales all over started nosediving. Look at that rack of copies of the game. I mean GOD, they discounted the price on the game to try and get it moving again. 

Even on Amazon, EG5 was reduced in price to under 4200 yen.  It's not a good sign when a game is discounted so much and sales still decline. Was Gundam discounted so much so soon after release?

you're right about one thing for sure, the PS3 lineup in Japan for holiday season is very underwhelming.

it's back to school time, so in some ways it's reflecting the userbase of the Wii. if parents were gonna pick up a wii for themselves, seems like the start of a school year is a bad time to do so if they have kids. and obviously if the kid wants a wii, the parents won't be getting it this time of the year. this trend is likely much more pronounced for the wii than the ps3.

obviously, as a nintendo shareholder, i'd much rather the wii experience no dropoff in sales, but that just wouldn't make sense.

is the user-base deteriorating? no, it's more like the wii is just reaching some saturation level now, after 10 months. we're gonna see just what this saturation level is, although in about 2 weeks i expect sales to start going up again as kids again start getting what they want.

its a slow time in japan. look at the ds its under 100k
also, NA wii sales went up 20 % last week so maybe they shipped heaps there for metroids release?

its not even doing badly. i mean if the numbers stay that way, wii will sell 200k in one month and if they stay that way for the ps3 it will sell 80k in one month.

i dont think nintendo has anything to worry about.

Eh, i don't think it matters to much for the Wii. Just so long as they stay ahead of PS3.

Japan is important... but being ahead in japan is all the Wii needs to do in my opinion. By being ahead of PS3 they can convince Japanese Devs who make games that mostly sell in japan to focus on the Wii.

This doesn't work as well in the US and Europe however because the combined 360+PS3 base is ahead of the Wii base. So games that sell well only in America (and europe) are better put on 360+PS3.

If they are diverting it might be more then just MP3. They may also want to try and outpace both systems or get close enough that the numbers elsewhere will influence America developers even more.

Okay here is all the numbers for Wii Sales from the VG charts site from July 15 to Sep 1:

-------------North America -------Other -------Japan------- Total
Sept 1 ----122,539------ --------97,239----- 49,322----- 269,100
Aug 25 ----101,932 -------------104,390---- 49104------ 255,426
Aug 18 ----99,623 ---------------106,630----- 73,226---- 279,228
Aug 11 ----96,486--------------- 100,630------ 65,341---- 262,457
Aug 5 ------102,599-------------- 95,928------ 63,391----- 261,918
July 28 ------106,197------------- 99,113------ 75,243---- 280,553
July 21 -----109,194-------------- 92,736------- 82,858---- 284,788
July 15 -----101,673-------------- 91,855------ 109,523 ----303,051

Sales generally hover between 260,000 and 280,000 worldwide. In cases where high profile games get released the sales for that region are higher. (MP3 Sept 1 and DQS Jul 15). The average of all the weeks is 274,565 units per week.

It doesn't appear to me that sales are declining accross the board, they seem to be well within an acceptable percentile of the average (less than 20% plus or minus 274,565). This means that supply has likely stayed about the same and that demand is still very high worldwide.

This doesn't mean that demand in Japan is not down. Perhaps it has and Nintendo is wisely diverting shipments to other areas where demand is greater (hence a 122K week in NA). I also read the other day that Nintendo just started selling the Wii in South Africa, meaning there are still markets that Nintendo has yet to tap.

Long and short; Where demand increases, is where supply gets diverted. Where demand decreases is where it comes from.

 Metroid Prime is nothing to the Japanese.

Haha, idiots think that its losing popularity in japan. They are manufacturing more for the US and less for Japan. It's blatantly obvious.