Japanese games market shrinks 6.9% in 2009
Hardware sales decline 13% year-on-year, software sales down 1.8%
Enterbrain figures have shown the Japanese games market generated JPY 542.6 billion (USD 5.9 billion) in 2009 - a 6.9 per cent decline on last year.
Specifically, hardware sales declined 13.6 per cent to JPY 216.5 billion (USD 2.3 billion) and software sales were down 1.8 per cent to JPY 326.2 billion (USD 3.5 billion), according to the numbers (translated by Andriasang).
The figures also gave a break down of the top five best selling software and hardware for the year, where Dragon Quest IX on DS came out on top of the former with sales of over 4.1 million, and the Nintendo DS topped the latter, with sales that just tipped 4 million.
While Nintendo games dominated the top software sellers, Square Enix's Final Fantasy XIII managed to claim fifth position, despite its release late in the year.
The full top five top selling games were as follows:
- 01 Dragon Quest IX - 4,100,968
- 02 Pokemon Heart Gold/Soul Silver - 3,382,597
- 03 New Super Mario Bros Wii - 2,485,150
- 04 Friend Collection - 2,311,948
- 05 Final Fantasy XIII - 1,698,256
The top hardware chart (which combines the different console models into one category) was as follows:
- 01 Nintendo DS - 4,025,313
- 02 Sony PSP - 2,307,971
- 03 Nintendo Wii - 1,975,178
- 04 Sony PlayStation 3 - 1,727,041
- 05 Microsoft Xbox 360 - 331,706