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simoniker writes
"Have major RPG Blue Dragon and other Microsoft efforts paved the way for Japanese Xbox 360 success? 8-4 Ltd's John Ricciardi and Kotaku's Japanese correspondent Brian Ashcraft have been talking about the issue, with Ricciardi commenting on Gears Of War's recent appearance in the Japanese Top 10 game chart, with 33,000 units sold in one week: 'I mean, granted, everything is relative — so yes, in a market where the average 360 game sells around 5,000 copies, 30,000 or so may seem like a big deal, but at the end of the day, their userbase is not expanding. The week Gears came out they only sold a little over 7,000 pieces of hardware. It's not enough.'"
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saintory writes
"Apparently the Japanese console consumers are sinking their teeth into the modest Wii and are not as interested in the power-packed PS3. In fact, the Wii is outselling Sony's new console by a factor of almost 2:1. The number of PS3s sold into the Japanese market (466,716) falls well short of the million Sony had planned for the end of 2006. 989,118 Wii consoles have been sold in Japan in the same time span. From the article: 'Both Sony and Nintendo are projecting selling 6 million consoles by the end of March. Sony expects to start shipping the PS3 to Europe sometime that month as well. Straggling far behind Sony and Nintendo in the Enterbrain survey was Microsoft's Xbox 360, which had sold 290,467 since its Japan debut in December 2005. Selling machines in large numbers is crucial in the gaming business because it encourages software companies to make more games to play on the machines, which in turn boosts console sales.'"
