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The Almighty Buck Entertainment Games

Japanese Videogame Stats Illuminate, Confusticate 27

Posted by simoniker from the so-many-numbers dept.
Thanks to Game Science for its article analyzing Japanese videogame hardware and software sales for the first half of 2004. Of particular interest are the hardware sales for consoles ("PlayStation 2 - 1,365,260... Nintendo Gamecube - 340,204... Xbox - 18,239"), million-selling games ("Pokemon Fire Red & Leaf Green - 2,136,737... Dragon Quest V - 1,572,497... Sengoku Musou - 1,002,312"), a rare Western game popular in Japan ("Grand Theft Auto Vice City - 367,302"), a list of the publishers with the most games in the Top 100 ("Nintendo - 28...Bandai - 9... Konami - 8"), and the note that "The [videogame] market has increased 7.7% on the same period last year", meaning previous depressed forecasts for the Japanese games industry might not be entirely correct.
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Japanese Videogame Stats Illuminate, Confusticate More

Japanese Videogame Stats Illuminate, Confusticate

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  • Grand Theft Auto (Score:4, Informative)

    by dammitallgoodnamesgo ( 631946 ) on Thursday July 15, 2004 @03:04AM (#9705083)
    A "rare western game popular in Japan"? It's British, the Japanese have never been afraid to buy British games. It's American games they've always been wary of. Plus, being published by Capcom can hardly have hurt (Then again Arx Fatalis was published by Capcom in Japan, and seems to have gone to the bargain bins fairly quickly)

  • *Evil grin* (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Mmm coffee ( 679570 ) on Thursday July 15, 2004 @03:11AM (#9705104) Journal
    An anonymous reader writes "According to GameSpot, a Q&A with Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer has him saying that, although the company's Xbox game console isn't making money (or bleeding them dry), the pain has been worth it. 'We have gone from nowhere to a significant player,' he said, adding: 'I am betting we can take Sony in the next generation.

    Four hours later...
    Thanks to Game Science for its article analyzing Japanese videogame hardware and software sales for the first half of 2004. Of particular interest are the hardware sales for consoles ("PlayStation 2 - 1,365,260... Nintendo Gamecube - 340,204... Xbox - 18,239")
    =)

    • Re:*Evil grin* (Score:3, Interesting)

      by mwvdlee ( 775178 )
      Couldn't resist the grin myself either, especially since the top 5 states even the <b>old</b> gameboy advance sells more units than the XBox!

      Realisticly though, western products rarely sell well in the far east. Xbox sells quite reasonably in the west, it has gained some reasonable marketshare though apparently not enough to gain a profit.

      I'll be laughing my ass off when MS releases their stripped-PowerMac-with-a-crappy-OS and pits it against Sony's revolutionary Cell-based design, though! :D

    • Japan isn't the only market out there (Score:5, Informative)

      by kevinatilusa ( 620125 ) on Thursday July 15, 2004 @03:22AM (#9705140)
      January through November 2003 U.S. Sales:

      PS2: 4.41 million
      Gamecube: 2.12 million
      Xbox: 2.03 million

      Seems like a significant player to me

      (This is according to http://www.vgpro.com/news/4121 ; I'd welcome a second source)
      • PS2: 4.41 million
        Gamecube: 2.12 million
        Xbox: 2.03 million

        Seems like a significant player to me

        Sure, until you remember that the PS2 is TWO generations behind the xbox and gamecube and still sells better than both combined.
        • Two generations? Where are you getting that from? Two generations ago was the SNES.

        • You also have to realize that Playstation 2 was released a year earlier and had tons of games for it at launch, not to mention any playstation 1 game was backwards compatible. That alone is an incredible selling point. Plus there was the whole hype that there were only 500,000 PS2's coming to the states for Christmas of 2000. I think I even remember some people selling their PS2's on eBay for $2000-$3000 that year.

          Playstation had the advantage in timing, especially with the DVD Boom. Microsoft knew they co
      • The profits from each console are also important. I wonder which actualy has the highest profit per unit shipped. Nintendo is kind of a unique case because most of the best selling software on the system is made by Nintendo themselves(Mario, Metroid, Zelda etc). Are there a lot of casual ps2 gamers out there who own a playstation and maybe 3 or 4 games? In that case sony's profit per unit may not be all that high.
      • Bah. Everyone buying an Xbox at THIS point is only installing linux or SNES emulators. That's what I'm doing...
        • That's a huge load of crap. If you want to point to anecdotal evidence I can say out of 50 people that I know that have Xboxes only one has it modded.
        • Only one of the people I know with an XBox uses it for games anymore. I have bought two myself, and both sit collecting dust, while the PS2s gets used every day. (Currently mostly FF XI and Tetramaster) A couple of my friends had it modified one as a media client but now use a dual boot window/linux box instead. I modified mine for something similar but never really used that one much. From what I've seen of the XBox games is that they are more even targeted to a male 18~25 audience than must other system,

  • strange omission (Score:5, Interesting)

    by MORTAR_COMBAT! ( 589963 ) on Thursday July 15, 2004 @09:18AM (#9706972)
    Of particular interest are the hardware sales for consoles ("PlayStation 2 - 1,365,260... Nintendo Gamecube - 340,204... Xbox - 18,239"), million-selling games ("Pokemon Fire Red & Leaf Green - 2,136,737... Dragon Quest V - 1,572,497... Sengoku Musou - 1,002,312")

    The submitter's hardware list doesn't list the GBA SP which sold 1,295,460 units in the described time frame, and the GBA which sold 158,516, yet it does list a GBA game, Pokemon. Thus, the total GBA system sales were almost 90,000 units more than the PS2.

    What's even more interesting to me is that only the GBA SP and the GameCube sold more units in Q1/Q2 of 2004 than they did on Q3/Q4 of 2003.

    Oh yeah, that, and that the XBox did not have a single software title in the Top 100. PS2 had 50, GBA had 38, and the GameCube had 12.

    And one last bit: Pokemon Ruby/Sapphire sold its 5 millionth unit during the period.

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