On the first day of sales in Japan the PS4 didn’t seem to fly off the shelves, but things changed gradually until shops and online stores started to run out of stock between the tail of the weekend and yesterday, and this morning we learned that the console sold a rather flattering 322,083 units in the country.
Sony Computer Entertainment Japan and Asia President Hiroshi Kawano witnessed the first sales with his own eyes, attending the launch by vising local stores in Tokyo “after sleeping only two hours,” as the night before he hosted the count down event. He told his take on the situation of sales to Nikkei Trendy:
We’re seeing the upsurge grow gradually in Japan. We want to clearly tell the concept of the PS4, that’s it’s different from PS3 and that its features are important. We want to show that it’s not just a successor.
He also talked about the situation of the availability of the console, explaining that some articles and comments that talked about slow sales may have been premature:
Mainly due to the fact that online stores shown “in stock” at the beginning, some said that the PS4 wasn’t selling well in Japan. Yet those sites gradually went to “out of stock” and over the counter availability has become scarce as well.
Kawano-san then mentioned that many game publishers and developed were moving to smartphones and social games, but it seems that Sony is managing to reignite their interest in home consoles with the PS4, and this may in turn help the Japanese gaming industry to become more popular worldwide.
He explained that the key to sales in Japan is how much Sony will be able to expand the world of PS4. While the hardcore within the core will buy a new platform without thinking twice, it’s also important to spread its popularity to new kinds of customers, and the way to do that is integrating the console with social media to liven up the user environment. Kono-san concluded that he definitely wants to challenge that expansion.
In the meanwhile a second shipment of the console has been delivered to Amazon Japan, that has already run out of stock again, and to the leading retail chain Yodobashi Camera, that has a very popular online store and 21 shops across the country.
At Yodobashi, The PS4 is again sold out online, while some of its brick and mortar shops already received the new shipment and part of it already evaporated. More consoles are scheduled to be delivered on the 27th to those shops, as shown by the availability table below.
Other retailers like Edion and Rakuten remain out of stock, but we weren’t able to verify whether they received a shipment today or not.
