This table, which lists the top 20 titles in Europe, has been created by Nintendo by adding software sales figures from January to September 2012 that were provided by market research companies in the following 14 European countries: the UK, Germany, France, Spain, Italy, the Netherlands, Belgium, Ireland, Portugal, Denmark, Sweden, Finland, Austria and Switzerland.
As each European country has its own market characteristics, I would like to use these data first to paint an overall picture of the European market.
This year we have three titles for Nintendo 3DS that were not included in the table for the same period last year. The new entries for the Pokémon series were launched in October this year, as opposed to March the previous year, and evergreen titles for Wii are losing their presence in the market. This ultimately led to an overall year-on-year reduction, from 10 to eight titles, for Nintendo platforms. Also, the three Nintendo 3DS titles are the only titles in the top 20 that are designed for a handheld system, and this shows that the weight that handheld systems have in this market is very different from the Japanese market. In the Japanese market, 13 titles in the top 20 are for handheld systems.
In Europe, Sony’s PS3 is taking a lead over Microsoft’s Xbox 360, with nine titles listed for its platform.
This graph shows the sales of home consoles in the European market. These are Nintendo’s estimates based on sales information provided by market research companies in each European country.
While every platform saw a slower pace of sales, Wii sales, which saw a big increase in May last year when we performed a price reduction, had a particularly large year-on-year drop.
This is a year-on-year comparison of weekly sales transitions of handheld game systems in the European market.
Nintendo 3DS had the biggest market share even before the launch of the Nintendo 3DS XL system, but it was far from satisfactory in terms of sales. However, after week 30, which corresponds to the launch of the Nintendo 3DS XL system, sales grew considerably, and the sales boost from this launch was greater than that of the markdown in the previous year’s summer. As a result, Nintendo 3DS led the European video game market in August.We succeeded in maintaining a good sales pace for Nintendo 3DS from September to the first half of October, which is usually the slowest sales season for handheld game systems. Therefore, we feel that we have laid a firm foundation upon which to accelerate sales further as we head into the year-end season.
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Source:
http://www.gonintendo.com/?mode=viewstory&id=188768