Japanese publishing company Enterbrain's latest report on the Japanese games market contains some interesting comments about Nintendo's upcoming DS 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 debut and beyond.

Though Nintendo has yet to officially confirm the feature, Hamamura echoed the rumor that the system will employ a touch-screen interface on one or both of its two screens. He also claimed that Nintendo is ready to show 30 DS titles alongside the hardware at E3.

Hamamura's predictions seem unusually optimistic, given recent reports from developers and publishers about the state of their DS development efforts. However, Japanese developers have been much more enthusiastic about supporting the DS than North American companies.

As for the coming generation of console hardware, Hamamura reflected the current conventional wisdom, saying he expects Microsoft to debut its next Xbox in the end of 2005, while he expects Sony's next PlayStation in 2006.

In other good news for Nintendo, it topped Enterbrain's annual sales charts with more than 6.5 million units of console 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 terms, and it doesn't count the sales of Pokemon Fire Red and Leaf Green, now the purview of Nintendo's Pokemon Company subsidiary. Square Enix came in second with more than four million units sold.

Overall, though, the Japanese games market took a dip in the past fiscal year. Hardware unit sales dropped 15.7% to 7.38 million units -- predictable near the mid-point of a hardware release cycle, but software sales also dropped slightly to 55.2 million units, a 1.7% decrease.

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