CESA’s latest White Paper, a collection of videogame-related statistical data of the Japanese market, reveals that the Japanese game industry has improved by 49.6 percent in 2005 to 1359.8 billion yen ($11.6 billion). The increase is in comparison to 2004.

For the first time, this year‘s White Paper includes the mobile phone gaming market which represents around 101.2 billion yen ($866 million).

Compared to the previous year, the hardware business has almost doubled to 872.7 billion yen ($7.47 billion), while the software business improved only by 4 percent to 487.1 billion yen ($4.17 billion).