Survey of the Adjourned Sale Rate of the Japanese Home Video Game Industry

This study by Yuhsuke Koyama of the Tokyo Institute of Technology examines the adjourned sale rate of Japanese home video games, defined as the share of titles whose release was postponed at least once, with the aim of establishing it as an indicator of project management in the industry. The analysis covers Sony's PlayStation (PS), PlayStation 2 (PS2), and Nintendo's Game Boy Advance (GBA), using release schedules published weekly in the Famitsu magazine from September 1994 through March 2005. Limited editions, bundles, and budget re-releases were excluded, and the dataset comprises 3,232 PS titles, 1,719 PS2 titles, and 697 GBA titles.

The principal finding is that adjournment rates were highest in the first year after a platform's launch and declined steadily thereafter, consistent with a learning curve effect. PS adjournment rates were near 50% in its early years, falling to about 22% by 2001; PS2 began at roughly 33% in 2000 and reached 26% by 2004; and GBA started at about 24% in 2001 and dropped sharply to around 7% by 2004. Titles scheduled near the New Year or fiscal year-end, particularly in March and December, were disproportionately likely to be delayed, a pattern the author links to Japanese settlement practices and gift-giving customs.

Probit and ordered probit regressions confirm the downward trend and show that the effect of release timing varies by platform, being significant for PS2 but not GBA. Genre effects proved significant only for PS, where adventure, role-playing, and simulation titles, which feature lengthy scenarios and extensive static artwork, showed higher delay rates. The author attributes these patterns to the immaturity of multimedia production on early CD-based consoles, where delays in scenario writing cascade into other development stages, and concludes that the mobile platform, with its simpler technology, exhibited lower and faster-declining adjournment rates than the console platforms.