When comparing with 1999's ranking, one doesn't observe major differences: Nintendo is still the clear leader, Sony is second but still very far away, RPGs sell well. Nothing much has changed. Yet, this lack of change and the little details tell a lot more: in 4 years, Nintendo's status in the ranking hasn't changed much indeed, however, the company has released two new consoles and failed hard to make million seller titles. Only the Pokemon series on Game Boy Advance proves to be a never-ending success. On GameCube, only one single game makes it into the ranking, what a difference between now and 10 years ago when Nintendo's games were in almost every top spots !

When you look at the evolution of this ranking from the perspective of Nintendo's games and by following the timeline of the games releases, you see a steady decline; since the glorious days of the Famicom, Nintendo has never managed to achieve more million sellers from a new console than the one before, and gradually we arrived to this situation where Nintendo is having only one title in this ranking. If things keep going like this we can indeed worry for Nintendo's future and with this logic in mind, Nintendo's next console should not be able to have one single game in this ranking.

However pessimistic the situation seems, there is another important factor to take into account. Let's give a look at the Playstations. Interestingly, the Playstation 2 has many less million sellers than the first one, twice less. What does it mean ? Simply that it's maybe not Nintendo's fault but there is a recession in the market. The truth is that the video games market in Japan has never been doing as well as in the Famicom era. As strange as it may seem, the golden age of console video games is maybe not to come, it is maybe already gone, and it was when 8-bit and 16-bit consoles were released. And probably one reason for this, is the new technologies, Internet mostly, but even cell-phones and DVDs, which, by hugely enlarging the scope of home leisure, took players away from their consoles.