Xbox One, PS4 sales "disappointing" in China - Report

[binary solo]

Lawlight said:
Well, China is still a poor country in general.

But they still have 10s of millions of rich people. Because while it is a poor country in general is still has a population of over 1.3 BILLION people. The richest 1% of the population is 13 million people, which is half the population of Australia. And the 1%ers in China are as rich as the 1%ers anywhere except maybe Japan, USA, UK and Germany. And I would guess the 5%ers (~65 million people) at least in China have the disposable income to afford a console if they want one. The thing is, it seems they don't want one, or at least they don't want one that is subject to all the official controls that come with buying a console through normal China retail channels.

Then there is the one child thing. In families with 2 or more kids there's a better chance that at least one of them will be into video games. With a one child family there isn't as much chance of the kid being into video games. In this situation it requires a generation of gamers to become parents to start perpetuating a video gaming culture. I think China is probably back in the 80's or 90's in terms of pervasiveness of video gaming in the population. It should advance faster with the online world we live in now, but that will tend to keep people on PC and only slowly migrate to consoles, if ever.

If we assume the population of people well off enough to be able to afford a console is roughly the population of the UK, then if material means was the only issue we would reasonably expect 1.5-2 million combined PS4 and Xb one sales in the first year. The fact that we are looking at 1/3 to 1/4 of this means there are factors other than simple affordability at work here.