 |
Let me talk about the drastic changes which have taken place in the Japanese video game market during the past year. Nintendo's gaming population expansion strategy has worked in this market first and in a very short time period. This is what has happened in Japan as the result of the disruptive change. |
 |
 |
DS is showing rapid sales growth since the year-end sales season about one year ago, which was approximately one year after DS's Japan debut. DS's sell-through surpassed 10million in its 20th month since the launch, which was the fastest sales of 10 million units in the history of Japanese video games. Even today, there is no sign of sales slowdown.
Also, just when the hardware started showing the rapid sales growth, a number of million-seller software titles were born one after another. In Japan, 16 titles of DS software have already surpassed one million sales on our shipment basis. There is no precedent in the Japanese video game industry that this great number of million-seller titles were born in such a short time period.
|
|
 |
One thing notable here is the fact that a series of DS titles that we are marketing under the "Touch! Generations" brand, including software to pet puppies or train your brain, the ones that had never been considered a game, were able to create a new blue ocean market. |
|
 |
The scene at game retail outlets has completely altered, just as you can see here. A number of people, including seniors and female customers, are now making it a point of browsing the DS department. |
|
 |
Literally anyone, irrespective of age or gender, are visiting Nintendo sections in stores. Nintendo itself really wanted to expand the gaming population, but we could not imagine that the market would be changed this revolutionarily. |
|
 |
In this graph, we used the data from MediaCreate to compare the sales of January to around November 20 period in 2005 and 2006. As you can see, the console game market was shrinking, especially the software market. On the other hand, the sales of hardware and software are both significantly increased for the portable market, which has resulted in the overall year-on-year growth of the industry by a large margin. Especially, DS hardware sales increased 3.5 times the previous year, and DS software increased more than 4.2 times. As the result, while the console software market has shrunk to 85% of the previous year, the portable market increased more than 2.4 times. For the first time in the Japanese video game history, portable software sales outnumbered console software sales. |
|
