Nintendo tops Japanese publishing league tables on

The latest annual league tables for software publishers in Japan show that Nintendo built a comfortable lead on its competition during the past year, despite the fact that sales of Pokemon titles are not included in its figures.

Nintendo sold some 6.5 million units of software during the year to March 31st, according to Japanese magazine publisher and market research firm Enterbrain, which is the company behind the highly respected Famitsu magazine.

Square Enix came in second place in the league table, with almost four million units sold, while sometime challenger for the top spot Konami slipped to sixth place from last year's number four in the ranking.

Nintendo's figures are all the more impressive when you consider that they do not include sales of Pokemon related goods such as the multi-million selling Pokemon Fire Red / Leaf Green pair, whose combined sales made them into Japan's best selling game of the year.

Sales of Pokemon titles are now registered under a separately floated company, the Pokemon Company, in which Nintendo retains a 30 per cent stake. If the sales of both firms are combined, Nintendo outsold its nearest competitor by a factor of over two to one last year.

I have old sales chats from the 80's for example sales from a software house called ocean sold 750.000 copys of wizball In only 3 months. Full cost. They were a very low grade one shop on tapes not really pros but a couple blokes.


Nintendo selling 6.5mil sounds pretty bad to me. Pretty lack-luster.

When At the time games were not like there to day. should be a lot mroe sales then 6.5 mil A few australia idol winners together have sold over 1 milion albums in 4 months nintendo is only selling 6.5 million?