Enterbrain Chief Talks Nintendo DS

Japanese publishing company Enterbrain's latest report upon the Japanese games market contains a certain number of interesting comments about Nintendo's upcoming D handheld. Hirokazu Hamamura, president of Enterbrain (which publishes Famitsu Weekly and many other game and technology magazines), predicted big things for the system's E3 first attempt and beyond.

Though Nintendo has at the same time to officially confirm the feature, Hamamura reflected sounded the rumor that the a whole will employ a touch-screen interface upon one or both of its sum of two units screens. He also claimed that Nintendo is ready to exhibit 30 DS titles alongside the hardware at E3

Hamamura's predictions strike one as being unusually optimistic, given recent reports from developer and publishers about the state of their D exhibition efforts. However, Japanese developer have been abundant more enthusiastic about supporting the D than North American companies.

As for the coming generation of soothe hardware, Hamamura reflected the popular conventional wisdom, saying he awaits Microsoft to debut its nearest Xbox in the end of 2005 while he awaits Sony's next PlayStation in 2006

In other useful news for Nintendo, it topped Enterbrain's annual sales charts with more than 65 million units of relieve from distress and handheld software sold in Japan in the fiscal year ending March 31 That's more than 10% of the Japanese software market in unit limits and it doesn't count the sales of Pokemon Fire R and Leaf verdant now the purview of Nintendo's Pokemon Company subsidiary. Square Enix came in next to the first with more than four million units sold

Overall, admitting the Japanese games market took a dip in the past fiscal year. Hardware unit sales dropp 157% to 738 million units -- predictable near the mid-point of a hardware release circle of time but software sales also dropp slightly to 552 million units, a 17% decrease.

Copyright ?© 2004 Ziff Davis Media Inc. All Rights Reserv Originally appearing in 1UP