Enterbrain: Japanese games market shrunk 9% in 2010

Handhelds dominant in hardware as Nintendo takes lion's share of top ten software spots

News by Dan Pearson Contributor

Published on Jan. 6, 2011

Japanese retail data compiler Enterbrain has released figures for 2010 which show that the Japanese games market shrunk by 9 per cent compared to 2009, racking up ¥493.66 billion (£3.84bn) in sales, down from last year's ¥542.64 billion (£4.22bn).

The best selling hardware was the combined skus of the DS, shifting an extra 70,000 units over closes rival the PSP. Wii was the best selling console, outselling the PS3 by 150,000 units. The Xbox 360 managed 208,790 sales over the course of the year.

Hardware sales were the fastest shrinking market area, falling 18.9 per cent to ¥175.59 billion (£1.37bn), largely as a result of little new hardware hitting the market. The software market lost 2.5 per cent of its value, resulting in a retail value of ¥318.08 billion (£2.48bn).

Pokemon Black and White was the runaway winner in the software race, totalling almost five million sales in comparison to second placed Monster Hunter Portable 3, which managed 3,480,989 sales despite a 1 December release date.

Full tables of software and hardware sales are below, numbers in brackets are lifetime sales. All figures are courtesy of Enterbrain, as translated by Andriasang.