Nintendo Holds 20 Best Selling Games in Japan 89
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.'"
Third Party Dev & Publisher Response: (Score:4, Funny)
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Well, why not? How are you going to compete with Nintendo on their own platforms?
If I was a dev, I'd look at this list and think to myself that Nintendo's pretty much got their platforms locked up. This has always been one of Nintendo's problems in dealing with third party developers.
Re:Third Party Dev & Publisher Response: (Score:5, Insightful)
I don't know about the rest of you guys, but when I browse the games section (either at a store or on a website), I look at anything that I want to buy, then decide to buy it. I don't buy games one-at-a-time unless there's only one worthwhile game for sale when I'm looking. When I finish with the games I've purchased (either finish them or get bored with them), then I go buy more. So unless you're (as a hypothetical developer/publisher) releasing shitty "shovelware" games, there's an equal likelihood that I'll buy your game along with Nintendo's. It's not an either/or proposition.
On the flip side of things, I will not be buying a PS3 or an Xbox 360, therefore if you publish titles on anything other than the Wii, you will lose a potential sale to me. (I happen to be a Nintendo fanboy. If you prefer to be a Sony or MS fanboy, rearrange the names of the consoles in that last sentence. If you're willing to shell out for multiple platforms, ignore it entirely. It still holds true for a significant number of players, though.)
Nintendo's problems with 3rd parties seem to be manufactured by the gaming press and by anti-Nintendo fanboy-lunatics (not just fans, but the retarded fight-to-the-death fanboys. a.k.a. "Rabid Fanboys"). A true businessman in the game publishing industry would be smart to look beyond that hype.
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Nintendo *IS* competing with it's third parties. If I go to the store and I want to buy *a* game today, it'll probably be Super Paper Mario. I buy the AAA titles and the titles that have
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If they made better games you would consider buying them instead of super paper mario? Right? But now you think super paper mario is a better title and more worthy of your money? How is that a problem?
I guess that's why the non-Nintendo titles on their charts are so low down, on ALL platforms.
Yoshi and Mario rules, and you know it, but everyone is free to imagine that they are only for kids, their loss, not mine
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I have no idea if that have changed, but for the DS it worked good for them since the carts where much faster than UMD (oh, and they doesn't fall out..
Third-Party Devs *Can* Compete with Nintendo! (Score:2)
If the main developer on a platform constantly creates titles of the highest possible quality, obviously, the people who buy int
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Wii Sports? (Score:1)
Re:Wii Sports? (Score:5, Informative)
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Japanese sales charts via Kotaku [kotaku.com]
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Wii Sports is not a pack in in Japan, it is one of the highest selling games on the Wii over there (I think WiiPlay and it are really close in sales right now).
Hardware sales in Japan 30th april - 6th may (Score:2)
Wii: 101,320, up 1,202 (1.17%)
PSP: 35,172, up 1,312 (3.87%)
PS2: 14,815, up 2,231 (17.73%)
PS3: 12,974, up 183 (1.43%)
Xbox 360: 3,205, up 43 (1.36%)
Gamecube: 394, up 227 (135.93%)
Game Boy Micro: 340, up 290 (46.03%)
GBA SP: 302, up 193 (38.99%)
DS Phat: 69, up 23 (25.00%)
GBA: 11, up 11 (N/A)
So if Wii sports comes with every remote back and 85.000 was bought for 100.000 Wiis, then yes.
285.000 DS vs 35.000 PSP, ownage?
Cool that God of War or whatever it's called (the huge title
Hats of to Nintendo (Score:4, Insightful)
MS is a bit like Sega, trying to be hip but falling at it. While Sony is NeoGeo, first choice for the gaming snobs.
The only one missing is Atari: the clueless blundering money-grubbing fools with a few good ideas.
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Problem is NeoGeo's machines were worth every penny and arcade perfect..
remember NeoGeo only started selling consoles because of demand.... Their whole business model was around renting systems until customers demanded buying them.
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Good potential but bad implementation ?
Lynx and jaguar both fit in that category
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I can't understand why they haven't killed Sonic of already, they can't make anything good with him anyway, either the game is new, modern and suck, or it's the same old and therefor suck.
FFXII Revenant Wings (Score:2)
I wonder if US publishers have ever thought to publish a title in Japan in time for Golden Week (much like they time holiday season releases in the US)...
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But yeah, I watched some clips of the game on IGN, and it was definitely the same music (Giza Plains theme, etc.).
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I feel exactly the same way about Mitsuda, who I think followed exactly the same path as Horner. I loved his scoring with Chrono Trigger, and his work for Xenogears wasn't bad in spots, but then Chrono Cro
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Chrono Cross... I actually like much of it. But then again I don't see it as "melodrama," perhaps because I didn't play the game and just pick a choice set of pieces from the 3-disc score? Hard to say, but pieces like Scars of Time make me happy. It has
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That seems to be true of a lot of games, and Chrono Cross is prob
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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.
Re:FFXII Revenant Wings (Score:5, Interesting)
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 Mario Party is coming.... (Score:4, Interesting)
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.)
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then I went back to it on the psp emulated and if if it werent for the resolution I could see myself playing it properly.
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Something I realised last night... (Score:3, Insightful)
Everyone else keeps doing shitty ports, or inane and uninteresting games like Boogie or EA Playground. I want heavily involved games for the hardcore like Metroid Prime 3, I want simple and fun group games like Wii Sports.
Why is no one but Nintendo able to produce a game worth buying on the Wii right now?
I hear developers/publishers whining about the Wii not having sufficient hardware and it being previous generation and whatever else, but I'm not interested in PS3 or Xbox; just like a lot of other gamers out there. I have money, I want to buy Wii games from more than just Nintendo. Make some!
Every day it seems more and more like publishers and developers are completely missing the point and Nintendo is just eating up the market everyone else wants to pretend isn't there.
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Which of course leads to the boatload of crappy titles that either have come out, or are now scheduled to come out for the Wii.
(and the fallback position of lots of "retro" games being released to try to tide people over)
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One of the more rational conjectures I've heard about the 3rd party thing is that its very, very hard to compete with Nintendo. They're one of the largest concentrations of top tier talent in the industry. Hell, Miyamoto by himself is one of largest concentrations of talent in the industry, let alone all the other guys that are insanely talented. How many copies of games that Miyamoto designed have been sold? It must easily
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Just publishing a game for a Nintendo system does not mean that you're competing with Nintendo. I buy more than one game at a time when I find more than one game that suits my interests. Buying a Nintendo game and buying a 3rd party game for a Nintendo system are not mutually exclusive, therefore, nobody is competing with Nintendo by simply publishing for the Wii. They would have to be making a similar game to a Nintendo game in order to compet
-1, Pedantic (Score:2)
PSone was a handheld version of the PlayStation with a small LCD screen. It did very well, but it was not the runaway smash you were referring to.
PS/2 is a type of connector for computer peripherals. It perhaps was a runaway smash, but it was not by Sony, and was also not what you were referring to.
You meant simply "PS1" and "PS2". HTH.
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I'm sure that 3rd party developers have their stuff in the works, but it'll take time before it arrives. I agree, the Wii needs more 3rd party games.
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The only cool thing about it was two separate bags of cereal in the box. I remember being a kid and convincing my parents to buy it for me. "It's one box but TWO BAGS. That means that when the cereal is halfway finished you can open the second bag and you have fresher tasting cereal instead of the same old stale thing."
Meanwhile I ended up just opening both and mixing the two in the bowl. Heh heh heh.
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Other info (Score:4, Informative)
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Re:Other info, or why Japan is the Deciderer (Score:1)
Game makers could really learn from Nintendo (Score:3, Insightful)
First, it doesn't just rush shitty games or shitty hardware to market. They treat console design and game-making like the artistic, design-centric crafts they really are.
Second, they strike exactly the right balance between features/price with their hardware, and they revise the hardware appropriatley as time goes on to ensure their offerings continue to strike the right balance at any given time (as technology advances and more/better features can be had for the same price).
In those two regards, Nintendo has been operating very much like Apple -- but doing it even better than Apple does.
It's good to see companies really take pride in what they do, execute well on it, and get rewarded by the market for it. It gives you just a little glimmer of hope that capitalism can still bring about good things.
A clear sign of Nintendo's emenent doom (Score:5, Funny)
true market situation as gamers looking to spend their hard earned money have to go out and by products from Microsoft and Sony just to be able to keep playing new games!!!
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Prof. Layton and the Mysterious Village (Score:2)
Nintendo Deserves Its Recent Success... (Score:3, Insightful)
"A good game's a good game. If you build it, they will buy."
His competition states:
"Meh, just throw a few more clock cycles at the hardware."
The results seem... predictable.
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class Wii throws WiiMote {}
And yet everyone thought it was risky (Score:3, Interesting)
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Oh, wait, no it doesn't.
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Remember, trolls live under bridges. They don't know these things.
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Mind you, Microsoft's is the only one of the latest round of TV-connected machines I own, and I've got PSP as well as my DS, so why I'm so smug I'm not sure.