Nintendo Holds 20 Best Selling Games in Japan

moderatorrater writes "Nintendo's dominance of the Japanese sales charts continues, as Gamasutra reports on the top games for Japan's 'Golden Week' celebration. The top 21 titles sold in the country were all on Nintendo formats; most actually developed by Nintendo itself. FFXII: Revenant Wings topped the list at number one, and along with five other DS or Wii titles was the only sign of third-party competition in the Japanese best-sellers market. 'With the holiday period functioning somewhat like the Christmas period in the West, there were no new entries in the top thirty - although a number of family friendly titles did reappear in the top ten, with Yoshi's Island DS at number four with 58,948 units sold. New Super Mario Bros. on DS re-emerged at number eight with 51,681 units sold, with the second Brain Training game at number ten.'"

And Mario Party is coming....

[Dark Paladin]

Mario Party is coming at the end of the month, so I don't expect this trend to change any time soon.

The other thing I wonder about is with Nintendo's dominance of the Japanese market, I'm wonder how long until we see more 3rd party developers decide that their RPG/fighter/FPS game doesn't *need* 50 GB of storage and 3 billion operations per second. (Personal note: I'd be stoked for a high res FFVII remake for the Wii. I know, I'm weak.)

Re:And Mario Party is coming....

[7Prime]

Even better. Square just announced that they're doing 3D remakes of FFIV V and VI for the DS... which is wierd, seeing as though they JUST re-released them for GBA. I don't care so much for IV and V, but VI DESPERATELY needs a 3D remake, as it was designed with more 3D architecture in mind. Much more needed than simply a FF7 "clean up". FFVI is a far better game anyway.

Re:FFXII Revenant Wings

[7Prime]

I love John Williams. I didn't when I was younger, but when I started studying composition (and especially film music) in college, I developed an appreciation for him. Hitoshi Sakimoto, is nothing like JW, IMO. He lacks the thematic repetoire. He had no litemotifs, his character themes are uninspired, and his dungeon music is more background noise than music. He's too traditional, and not experimental enough for my tastes, either. I got into video games, entirely through Uematsu's work (not kidding), who I hold to being up there with Danny Elfman, John Williams, Yoko Kanno, and some of the other great film composers of our time. Uematsu's use of 70s progrock really works well too. He lacks a little bit of sonic depth that some electro-acoustic composers have (like the composer for the Shadow Hearts series, who is phenominal), but he makes up for it by having some of the most well-written themes ever composed, and then complimenting them with some very interesting arrangements. Hitoshi Sakimoto just feels like he's playing it safe all the time. I've gotta check out Vagrent Story, which I hear is by far his best soundtrack, but seeing as though I hated his work in FFT and thought his FF12 material was "meh", I'm not sure I'm going to like it. At least he's better than Mitsuda, though... who is laughably bad.

Re:FFXII Revenant Wings

[badasscat]

Golden Week isn't a gift giving holiday. It's a chance to travel somewhere. So, sales of games are actually pretty flat during GW. The big gift giving holiday is (sort of) New Years. At New Years, kids get money from their relatives, then they go out to the stores and blow it on toys. That's as close as Japan has to our holiday rush.

Well, this is not exactly true. The big *gift-giving* holiday is actually Christmas, just as it is here - yes, they do celebrate it as a consumer holiday. And yes, they do have a pre-Christmas holiday rush there. The difference is it is not a *family* holiday. That's New Year's. Christmas is a holiday for couples, which actually makes it really big in the video game market, because all those girlfriends go out and buy games for their boyfriends, and now with the DS, boyfriends can do the same for their girlfriends (ditto for husbands/wives, but it's still younger people that spend the most on games).

The post-New Year's week's sales are usually big too for the reason you mentioned, but all of December is huge because of Christmas. The DS sold like 2 million units alone last December, if I remember right.

Golden Week is *usually* bigger than the weeks surrounding it strictly for the reason that a lot of people have that whole week off, so they buy games to play. It's not Christmas or New Year's big, but it's still usually bigger than most weeks.

This year seems to have been fairly slow, actually, which makes it sort of strange to see the numbers being called out in western news, as if there's something noteworthy about them.

And yet everyone thought it was risky

[patio11]

The consensus in the industry was that underpowered, gimmicky little DS strikethrough Wii was going to megaflop. Nintendo's stock price is up something like 40% since last August, and by August you had all the information you needed about the Wii's capabilities to forecast its future success *except* the sales numbers that gave proof of it. 40% was the uncertainty discount, and wow, thats a lot of uncertainty. Heck, I bought my Nintendo stock months after the Wii release and its up ~15% from then. People just keep getting amazed at how much they're owning this round.

Oh, keep buying your Wiis, people. I think I get about a millionth of a penny for every one sold. Whoo-hoo!