The Japanese Computer Entertainment Suppliers Association (CESA) has released its annual White Paper today. The report, which analyzes the state of the Japanese as well as the international game market each year, not so surprisingly shows declines across all key statistics for the Japanese market, even as the industry managed to ship more units of hard and software worldwide on a year-to-year comparison. The Japanese market's scale for 2002 was down to 501.4 billion yen (4.22 billion USD), a sharp fall from the 2001 figure of 613.4 billion yen (5.16 billion USD). After questioning 43 unnamed companies, the report also concludes that Nintendo's GameCube is the most expensive console to develop software for, while Sony Computer Entertainment's PlayStation One offers the lowest development costs. User numbers continue to decline in Japan, as 23.60 million users have been counted (that being 25.6% of Japan's entire population of about 126 million people). The number of online game users has reached 2.60 million in the meantime, while game contents for mobile phones have already attracted 6.04 million customers.

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