Top Japanese Publishers Revealed

Japanese magazine publisher Enterbrain has revealed a list of the five top publishers in Japan for the whole of 2004. The results can be seen below, along with the total number of games sold and the number of titles appearing in the top 100 selling games of the year. 1. Nintendo (7.33 million games sold, 28 titles) 2. Square Enix (6.41 million games sold, 10 titles) 3. The Pokémon Company (4.34 million games sold, 5 titles) 4. Konami (2.99 million games sold, 6 titles) 5. Capcom (2.20 million games sold, 7 titles) As usual, Nintendo emerged as the most successful publisher, almost 1 million ahead of nearest rivals Square Enix. If the results of subsidiary The Pokémon Company are added to the parent company’s results, their total number of games sold exceeds 11 million in Japan alone. Overall, during 2004 the Japanese market was down 0.7 percent compared to 2003, for a total of 427.9 billion yen ($4.2bn). Despite improvements over 2003 and better results in the latter half of the year, a lack of prominent releases in the first half meant the hoped-for improvements in the Japanese market failed to materialize in their entirety. In hardware terms, the most successful console was the PlayStation 2 with 2.75 million units sold, followed by the Game Boy Advance SP at 2.37 million (results for the original Game Boy Advance are not available). The Nintendo DS was the third most successful but final numbers are not yet available.