It’s seems so long ago now when console gaming was synonymous with Japan, yet as the years have gone by, gaming has never felt so western. Japan’s tastes have changed since the early 2000’s as mobile and handheld gaming has taken centre stage. With the launch of the PS5 I thought it would be interesting to see if a new generation and a new console launch has made any impact over the past year, or are things just going to stay the same?
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| Japanese Launch Photos |
The PS5 is now reaching a full year on market shelves, and recently hit the milestone of reaching 1 million sales in the Japanese market. Whilst this maybe something to be celebrated, there's more to it than that.
Looking back, we have some small indication as to the initial Japanese sales. Media Create was one of the most established ways of gauging Japanese sales figures for both hardware and software. Unfortunately, a few years back they stopped sharing these figures and the only thing we have to off is the Famitsu figures instead. Whilst we can compare Famitsu sales with previous PlayStation console sales, we don't have the cross-reference we once had when comparing to Media Create sales.
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| Someone got lucky... |
So looking at the hardware figures above, the figures aren't all that impressive. In fact, they're incredibly poor. To put it into perspective, someone on the Resetera forum compared the sales figures from the PS4 and PS3, and the PS5 doesn't come anywhere close.
The figures were so poor, it was the first PlayStation console since the PS1 which didn't sell 1 million in it's home territory for the first time. In fact, it didn't take until the 8th September 2021 to reach those numbers. But that's not the full story. Despite it hitting 1 million in Japan, there's some rumours that the sales weren't entirely indicative of Japanese sales at all. With the PS5 being stock constraint, it seems like many of these Japanese sales were actually shipped to other Asian territories to boost Asian PS5 stocks.
Looking at the situation, it looks like the trajectory of home console sales in Japan are still in a sharp decline to the point where home markets such as France are becoming more popular. We can still see strong software and hardware sales for Switch and mobile games, but the renaissance of Japanese console gaming is long gone. Even Japanese developed games are now targeting western audiences first. Kojima's Death Stranding had a distinct western feel and Final Fantasy XVI and Tales Arise both having an English dub first with the latter having their soundtrack sung in English for the first time.
Despite the grim console sales in Japan, they're still pumping out some amazing games over the recent years. I think we will see games have a continued focus on western audiences a the Japanese target audience slowly disappears. Whether this has an impact on Japanese game development we will have to wait and see.
https://www.resetera.com/threads/media-create-sales-week-53-2020-dec-28-jan-03.356956/
https://www.resetera.com/threads/media-create-sales-week-46-2020-nov-09-nov-15.329204/
https://www.resetera.com/threads/media-create-sales-week-47-2020-nov-16-nov-22.333380/
https://www.gematsu.com/2020/12/famitsu-sales-11-23-20-11-29-20
https://www.gematsu.com/2020/12/famitsu-sales-11-30-20-12-6-20
https://www.gematsu.com/2020/12/famitsu-sales-12-7-20-12-13-20
https://www.gematsu.com/2020/12/famitsu-sales-12-14-20-12-20-20
https://www.gematsu.com/2021/01/famitsu-sales-12-21-20-1-3-21
https://www.resetera.com/threads/famitsu-playstation-5-sales-top-one-million-in-japan.483847/
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