Enterbrain CEO Hirokazu Hamamura holds a seminar twice a year to discuss sales data his company collects and to prognosticate on the game industry's future. According to Enterbrain publication Famitsu, Hamamura's spring seminar brought positive news for the recently ended financial year, but tempered it with a gloomy outlook for Japanese publishers in 2006.

　　Hamamura started with a look back at the hardware market during the Japanese 2005 financial year (from April 2004 to March 2005), during which the Nintendo DS and the Sony PSP drove total unit sales to just over 100 million, a 23 percent increase over the previous year.

　　Strong hardware sales drove overall market growth, but Hamamura said software sales were also strong for the year, totaling 660 million units, up 8 percent compared to last year. But despite the growth in the number of games sold, the total value of the software market stayed flat year-on-year at 309 billion yen (about $2.6 billion).

　　Hamamura attributed the disparity to the fact that software for handhelds usually has a lower unit price than the console software that represented a larger portion of sales in 2004. The popularity of Nintendo DS games contributed to this trend; DS titles accounted for seven of the top 10 sellers for 2005.

　　The overall market in 2005 was positive, amounting to 472 billion yen ($4 billion), about 9 percent ahead of total sales for 2004. Despite that, Hamamura believes that 2006 will be a hard year for publishers. He said that many publishers have recently rushed current-gen games to market, racing to beat what they believed until recently would be a May launch for the PlayStation 3. The surplus of rushed games has flooded the market and depressed sales according to Hamamura, and he doesn't expect publishers to recover until autumn.