In a recent post on Gamasutra, a Japanese sales report for last week showed that the top fifteen selling games are all on Nintendo formats, and only two of those fifteen aren’t made by Nintendo themselves.  This week, Metal Gear Solid: Portable Ops for the PSP managed to squeak into a number 8 position on the top 10, but apart from that, Nintendo still dominates most of the list.  Japan, you can love your Nintendo, just don’t love your Nintendo.

Though this doesn’t greatly surprise me, I did sort of assume that PS3 titles were doing better than this.  Actual console sales for the PS3 were also less than satisfactory, as they sold 25,531 units during the week, compared to the 93,708 Wiis sold.  Even the Xbox 360, which has seen rising sales due to the game Blue Dragon, doesn’t even come close to placing on the list.  Granted, the 360 has had a hard time selling in Japan, so one can’t expect it to compete with Nintendo overnight.  But regardless, seeing these sort of numbers puts the Japanese market in perspective:  Nintendo titles thus far have been first and foremost geared towards the Japanese market.

1up recently wrote an interesting, yet long winded article about this very phenomenon.  While suffering from excessive generalizations throughout the article, it is certainly worth reading.  In any case, one can at least glean why Nintendo is doing so well:  if Sony and Microsoft expect to compete in Japan, something will have to give.

-Bedlam-