Being the third largest economy in the world is usually pretty cool. It wasn’t as cool for Japan in 2009, as their economy joined every other one in going south. Because of that, their games market also suffered. Raking in 5.9 billion dollars in sounds great, but that’s actually down 6.9 percent from the year before.
The big difference was hardware sales, which were down over 13 percent. This kind of makes sense, as 2009 was the year of console rehashes. Games themselves were down 1.8 percent, which is not near as bad, but still sucks when you consider that some of the biggest franchises had games come out last year.
Speaking of, Dragon Quest IX was the best-selling game of ’09 in Japan with 4,100,968 copies sold. And despite just being released not too long ago, Final Fantasy XIII made #5 on the list for the whole year, with 1,698,256 copies sold so far.
Japanese games market shrinks 6.9% in 2009 [Gi.biz]
