While the Western market has seen tremendous market expansion in 2008, the year hasn’t been nearly as great in Japan.

According to magazine publisher Enterbrain (via AFP), the Japanese video game market shrank 15.3 percent in 2008, marking the first time in four years that the market had negative growth. Total industry sales in the country came in at $6.26 billion, down from $7.4 billion in 2007.

The report blamed the lack of new hardware launching in the country for the steep decline. In 2007, hardware sales of the Nintendo Wii and PlayStation 3 helped boost sales according to Enterbrain (however, the PlayStation 3 and Wii launched in November and December of 2006, respectively).

Enterbrain also released 2008 hardware sales for the country, with Nintendo’s Wii and DS platforms leading the way. The Wii sold 2.91 million hardware units in the country last year, while the DS sold 4.03 million units. Sony took second place in hardware sales, selling 991,000 PlayStation 3’s and 3.54 million PlayStation Portables.

Microsoft came in last, selling 318,000 Xbox 360s.