In a mad effort to clean up some of my saved blog posts I managed to accidentally delete my post about the Japanese market. I had a bunch of different starts I wanted to talk about that I gathered at www.vgchatz.com that showed how the Nintendo DS has taken over Japan and is really the only game in town. Just last week in the top 50 games sold the Wii had 6, PS3 had 2, PS2 had 6, 360 had 1 and PSP had 1. That's 15 home console games and one PSP game leaving 34 DS games in the top 50 games sold. To get some perspective on this 12 DS games made the top 50 games sold in North America last month. The majority of the games sold where for home consoles.

In Japan the move away from home consoles seems to be the overwhelming trend. That casual games that Nintendo has placed on the DS has taken over the market and the game market in Japan is recovering from a long lull. Over the last six years game sales in Japan had been declining. The hardware sales where fairly steady but people where buying less games. It can be argued that home console games have become too complex and take too long to play so they were only appealing to the hard core audience. With the emergence of the Nintendo DS's approach to create easy to play fun little games, the Japanese market is rebounding and Nintendo is seeing record profits.

The question is will this trend come to the US? There are still hardcore games and home consoles that sell in Japan but no next gen home console is threatening the records set by the PlayStation or PlayStation 2. The DS does well in the US selling a lot of software and has a lot of casual games designed to kids and women. Still the market in the US is not yet ready to cast off their home consoles in favor of the portable consoles. The US market still has a very strong hardcore market that buys a lot of software and home consoles. The Wii console sells very well in the US but is not moving as much software as an Xbox 360 or a PS2. This may change as more titles come out and more systems become available. For now the DS is doing very well in the US but does not have market dominated like it does in Japan. It will be interesting if the Wii or PS3 will very complete against the DS in Japan or if the home console will be regulated to the secondary console for gamers.