(Jan. 10, 2010 4:36 PM)Hagane Ginga Wrote: Nintendo and other japanese brands are definitely producing more games for the Wii and DS... the same with the PS3 and PSP. The Wii is one of the best things that have happened to the Japanese gaming market.
The Wii is one of the worst things to happen to the Japanese gaming market. It's the exact same cycle that happened with the GameCube and N64, where Nintendo's stuff sells tremendous, but minus some exceptions, all the third party stuff sells like trash (inb4 "Uhh Carnival Games or Taiko, har har har" I'm not talking about those kind of games). It's worse this time because Nintendo is the market leader.
When Tales Of Graces, a Wii mainline Tales game is outsold by more then double compared to Tales Of The World 2, a PSP spinoff game, something is wrong. When a brand new DragonBall game on Wii can't even crack 10,000 units in it's first week, something is wrong. When Naruto and Bleach games perform even worse then that DragonBall game on Wii, something is wrong. When a brand new Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles on Wii gets extensive advertisements, and is praised to be a good game, sells less then ports of the original two Final Fantasies, something is wrong.
When it took three years for the HD consoles to finally have a game that sold 1 million units, something is wrong.
I won't be surprised when Final Fantasy XVI is announced for a handheld. I'm saying 16 because I assume we'll get another mainline Final Fantasy this gen.
The only franchises that made the jump from PS2 to Wii/PS3/360 in Japan that didn't experience a huge drop in sales have been Yakuza and Taiko. Everything else has been a shadow of their PS2 days. Because I love DragonBall Z, the Sparking/Budokai Tenkaichi games used to debut with sales of around 200k on PS2, Raging Blast (The successor franchise) debuts with 80k with PS3 and 360 sales combined. The franchises that made the jump from PS2 to DS/PSP have experienced either sales on par, or sales better then what they experienced on the PS2. Case in point, Dragon Quest IX for DS, the highest selling Dragon Quest ever.
This is the gen where Japan outside of the first party studios, will no longer be a prominent console developer.