I read a few articles recently predicting the global down fall of Wii based on current trend in Japan since Japan has always been an excellent market for measuring upcoming trends. While I agree that Wii won't continue its amazing growth rate in the coming year, I don't think there will be a sharp down trend for it either.

PSP has its comeback early last year in Japan with MHP2G and updated hardware. It ousold DS consistently from Feb until early August and almost moved as many unit as DS for the year. While the software support for PSP remain strong and it's still selling well in Japan with MHP2G (although down 40% over the same period from last year), the sale in NA and Others have sunk lower (down about 20% over the same period last year). It's obvious that the momentum PSP had from Japan for sales did not carry over to other markets. However, the announced PSP software lineup outside Japan does improved significantly this year which is a trend we see from Japan.

PS3 has done very very well for Sony in Japan this year. The sale is up 20% over the same period last year and it's consistently outselling Wii for the last two month. However, the sale is down about 17% outside Japan this year. Can we expect the sale for PS3 outside Japan to dramatically improve following the trend in Japan for the rest of the year or next year? Based on the performance by PSP this year, it is definitely not a given. It still might happen but it is certain not a sure thing. The NA and Others markets are not as big game driven as the Japanese market so software alone will not be enough to improve the sales considerablely. While Sony already has a strong lineup of software for PS3 coming this year, it needs to regenerate the interests for PS3 and offer more incentives in order to vastly improve the sales globally.

I don know about globally, but its a good start. Cause I think the PS3 is down in the other 2 areas

Pricecut/slim/colours are the only things that will help PS3 worldwide...

Maybe GT5

It will help the overall world wide numbers not look so bad, but it doesn't help the fact that it is down in the other regions and down overall YoY.

Quite frankly the increase in Japan has just been because of a few hit titles and lack of new stuff to spur Wii interest.

Japan is keeping the PS3 above 100K WW so it's helping for sure

Nope, It's down everywhere except Japan. This isn't momentum, not by a long shot. Actually looking at the big titles who came out in Japan, it should have buried the wii. The wii without games still held its own. The PS3 showed more weakness than strength.

If we looked to Japan for all our trends the 360 would have less than 5 million in WW sales.

Of course it will.

Yes becouse Japanise developers can't ignore it now after it proven it can sell tons of software there and once a lot of this software starts hitting west it will also have some impact on sales there.