Last week's video game sales charts from Japan paint a very interesting story...
In short, you need to go down fifteen places before you find a single game title that wasn't for a Nintendo console. In fact, nine of the Top Ten were first-party Nintendo titles, fifteen of the top twenty, and twenty of the top thirty.
Even more surprising is how OLD some of these games are. Animal Crossing was released over a year ago, and was still #7!
Worse yet for Sony, four out of their six titles on the list aren't even for a current-generation system! The PS3 doesn't make a single appearance on the list, while the PSP only has two titles able to break Nintendo's stranglehold on software sales. Meanwhile, Microsoft isn't anywhere to be seen at all.
Quite simply, if there was any doubt that Nintendo was going to pwn this generation you need only look to Japan. Nintendo is trashing all comers there, leading in both console and software sales by a long, distant shot.
Microsoft can trumpet their 10 million consoles until the end times, and rightly so. However, they don't have a single million in Japan, while Nintendo is screaming forward in all regions as fast as they can produce systems and games.
Sony is only at 1 million consoles worldwide, and already they are sitting on shelves here in North America.
I'm doing my "told you so" dance right now. We'll see how long it goes before something changes in the industry and I have to stop.
20070112
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There was never a doubt in my mind that Japan would be seized by the Wii, as the Wii is precisely the type of thing they'd like, from what I know.
The real question is as to how it will catch on in the US. You yourself, despite your partiality to Nintendo, have an Xbox too, and it seems to me than amoung the younger crowd there's a somewhat mixed attitude about it. Some think it's interesting, some think it's awesome, others think that people playing the Wii look really stupid and so would never do it.
So long as it gains some good momentum in the next few months, however, I think it will at least give the Xbox 360 a good run for it's money, and so long as it does that it will win this console generation as a whole.
With the Wii sales depend the most on the popular perception of it, since it embodies a major change in the way video games are played.
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