Nintendo tops Japanese half-year software sales rankings

Japanese software and hardware sales figures for the first half of the year have been released today, showing Nintendo still leading the pack in terms of software sales despite a strong challenge from Square Enix.

The figures, which cover the period from January 1 to June 30 this year, show that the merger of Square Enix has created an incredibly strong player in the software market - with 4.28 million units of software sold in the six month period.

Nintendo, however, is still out in front for software sales - although the company itself only clocked up 3.15 million units of software sold, its Pokemon subsidiary also sold 1.44 million units, for a grand total of 4.59 million units, just ahead of Square Enix' figure.

It's quite a drop from the top two companies, both of which sold over 4 million units of software, to the number three contender - namely Konami, with 1.84 million units. Sega, Capcom, Namco and Koei are all bunched together in the rankings after that, with figures ranging from 1.65 million units for Sega down to 1.57 million units for Koei.

Bandai sold 1.41 million software units, a significant number of which are accounted for by the popular .hack series of RPGs which are set to arrive in Europe shortly. Finally, Sony is the laggard of this league table, with 0.95 million software units sold.

The tables are turned for Sony in the hardware chart, however, which is sorted by market share. Sony's PlayStation 2 holds 58.5 per cent of the hardware market, which is impressive to say the least. The GameBoy Advance is next in line, with 28.6 per cent of the market, and the GameCube manages 8.3 per cent.

Xbox is languishing on a 1.6 per cent market share; it's still being outsold by the PSone (3.7 per cent), but at least it's no longer being embarrassingly outsold by the likes of the Dreamcast (0.6 per cent) and the WonderSwan Crystal (0.2 per cent)...

Polygon