Japanese Software Market Up 125% In 2006

Enterbrain, the Japanese publisher behind leading magazine Famitsu, has revealed new data which shows the Japanese games market experienced a significant expansion in 2006, following several years of decline. Software sales for the last twelve months rose by 125 percent to ¥363.89 billion ($3.02bn), with hardware sales up 160 percent to ¥ 261.9 billion ($2.17bn). Despite suffering from continued stock issues for the whole year, the Nintendo DS was the best selling hardware with 7.5 million units sold. Its nearest rival was the PSP on 1.9 million unit sales and the PlayStation 2 with 1.5 million units sold. In a clean sweep for the company, Nintendo was the top selling publisher, with 24.2 million units of software shipped. If combined with affiliate The Pokemon Company, this total rises to 29.8 million units. The second highest rated publisher in Japan was Square Enix, with 6.8 million unit sales in total. Enterbrain also revealed the top 100 selling titles of the year, with the top ten is dominated by eight Nintendo DS titles, all of which are published by Nintendo themselves and all but one of which are million+ sellers. Many, such as the Brain Training games and Animal Crossing: Wild World were also originally released in 2005. The highest rated non-Nintendo DS or PlayStation 2 seller was Wii Sports at twenty-one with a lifetime-to-date total of 553,214 units sold. The highest ranking PSP title was Monster Hunter Portable at number thirty with 435,181 units sales and the highest ranking Game Boy Advance title was Mother 3 at number thirty-six with 368,582 units sold. No PlayStation 3 or Xbox 360 titles were ranked in the top 100 sellers. The PlayStation 2 had the greatest number of games featured at forty-two (although weighted towards the bottom of the list), with the Nintendo DS totaling thirty-seven, the Game Boy Advance eight, the PSP seven, the Wii four and the GameCube one (Super Mario Strikers at number seventy-four with 191,993 units sold).