Media Create Japan Sales: Mario Kart Domination

The UK alone has a larger install base, never mind Europe as a whole.

Sadly no. A lot of the best games for the past decade comes from the Western world and indies had a great part in it. If you talk about the past before HD era then yeah but we live in the present. The Japanese indie scene is unknown and underdeveloped that it is essentially like a ghost. Indie game development where there is no publisher is still foreign to them with the image of an inferior product. Japan still makes great games but the quantity of these great games is very low. Not to mention most games here aren't made for an international audience and are thus usually not translated and sold outside of the country. You have to have both quality and quantity and of course be international to be a major part of the gaming industry. Until now, I'm still amazed at Japanese gamers not knowing Blizzard Entertainment and Braid, coming from the country supposedly known for gaming.

Last gen we got Valkyria Chronicles, The Last Remnant, Resonance of Fate, Ni No Kuni, Vanquish, Nier, Lost Odyssey, The World Ends with You, Muramasa, Ninja Gaiden 2, Street Fighter 4, Fire Emblem: Radiant Dawn, Xenoblade Chronicles, Super Mario Galaxy 1 & 2, Zelda Twilight Princess and Skyward Sword, No More Heroes, Monster Hunter 3, Bayonetta, Dragon Quest 9, among others. I would trade the vast majority of western games for those titles.

Less than 20k WiiUs on MK release week? Lol, so much for that system seller hype.

Yeah. I wonder what game it will take to get the market re-energized, or if anything can. I'm honestly surprised at the tiny WiiU bump, and I was the one saying it'd be smaller than Char and co. were hoping for. Shifting gaming trends and rising taxes are doing a real number on hardware over there. Not to mention the Japanese focused library makes the barren western library look stellar.

Honest question to those that follow Japanese gaming: What's on the horizon that might excite gamers?

Because if we can't find something to bring them back to "real" gaming platforms, we may have to wall off Japan to contain the mobile threat! ;P

Aside from Nintendo's games and action and fighting games, most of the titles you mentioned haven't been as influential as Braid, Minecraft, FEZ, Super Meat Boy, etc. The Witcher series trumps modern JRPGs. Japan hasn't made any game that can match the storytelling of The Walking Dead, an indie game. Japan still hasn't opened up to RTS. In the Western world, all kinds of genres exist and are recognized. There are a lot of issues holding back the Japanese video game industry. Honestly, with the current condition, Japan just doesn't have the capacity to replicate the past's glory and fame. Mobile gaming is eating up the industry here. I've been to TGS twice already. A mobile game company's cubicle was as big as Sony's and a big part of the building was dedicated solely to mobile gaming. I'm not sure with E3 but at least with E3, consoles still dominate and PC will always get multiplatform and indie games.

@lordlors: I'm not saying I would want to give up the best of the Western games, either. I would hate to miss out on the best Japanese games on consoles, though. They really are still very good.

ITT: a few rather salty cows.

Bad sales for the PS4, really bad sales. Need games.

Worse for the WiiU. I expected better with the release of the highest Nintendo profile game for a while. WiiU's fate is set in stone.

Consoles are officially dead in Japan.

PS3 > Ps4. Last gen FTW.

Hardware sales are piss-poor.

@charizard1605: Its good they can do well in Japan. In the rest of the world they are getting murdered.

Were. MK8 seems to have re-energized the Wii U worldwide.

@charizard1605: and I'm glad it did , but it's still far from the PS4. And with no third party support it's solely up to Nintendo to keep the console alive.

Well then, it's official. PS3>>>PS4

Oh, don't get me wrong- I'm not saying the Wii U will ever do as well as the PS4. I am just saying it will do well, period, on its own standards, it will do better than the ghastly numbers it has been posting so far. That really isn't much of a stretch, is it?

@charizard1605: If they have some good titles at E3 and keep it consistent then they have a chance. I would like to see it at least equal the GC.

If PS4 was leading Japan sales then I'm sure Japan sales wouldn't matter at all

Right cows?

WiiU won this month in Japan, let them have the victory.

Moospot.

It won;t play a big role, but japan and developing/smaller countries may determine if the PS4 ever does significantly better than the PS3.The xbox 360 and ps3 struggled to sell to developing countries.Sony now needs to focus on the developing countries if they ever want to the PS4 to do significantly better than the PS3 since it's kinda useless now for sony to focus on Japan again since they kinda failed to focus on the Japanese market while developing the PS4.

Erm, empty hype? I bought a PS4 in advance because of all the great exclusive games on PS3 that I, personally, enjoyed and got my money's worth. Their track record is great and I expect them to repeat previous successes on PS4 as all indicators are pointing that way.

Only in terms of console & PC gaming. If we mean video gaming as a whole, including handhelds, mobiles, and arcades, then Japan still has a huge gaming market, with revenues comparable to North America/Europe/China as a whole.

What a shitty time for Xbox, lol

You should know better than to bump up a thread that is four months old.