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.'"
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.