VGChartz Gap Charts April 2020 Discussion Thread

[Bofferbrauer2]

yo33331 said:

Bofferbrauer2 said:

PS2 sold 26M in RoW. No other consoles is even really close to that number, so yeah, they were a very big deal. And the PS2 got released there for the most part only after the release of the PS3 in the industrialized countries. Same with many eastern European countries, Middle East and northern Africa (which are all counted to Europe afaik). All in all that's probably about 40M consoles that were sold in countries where PS2 sales only opened up after the PS3 got released, not just 5% as you're claiming.

Claiming they were not a big deal is like saying that the PS4 won't sell over 115M, utterly ridiculous considering the data we have.

Those 26M of rest of the world include those middle east and northern africa countries that you mentioned, so no there can be 40M of the sales after 2006 only to "rest of the world" And those 26M are not all after 2006. Probably most like 15 or 20M at max. And even then PS2 still sold around 30M more after 2006 through out europe, us, and japan.

afaik Middle East is counted to Europe, though it might not have been at the time.

@bolded: PS2 died quickly in Japan, even before the PS3 got released. Just look at this graph with a 12 months moving average:

Notice how the sales started crashing down in Japan after ~60 months? At that point we are in March of 2005 and the PS3 is still 20 months away. At the point the PS3 launched the yearly moving average already dropped to 1M, and dropped to 500k a year later.

In other words, Japan only added ~2M to the PS2 sales after the PS3 launched. Similar trends in the US and Western Europe, or everywhere else where the console launched in 2000. But something big happened in 2005: The European Union got enlarged by 10 Easter European Members, and those got access to the console market along with it. Suddenly those countries could play on something more modern than some NES clone console, and the PS2 conquered those countries by storm. Same thing happened in the Middle East where they progressively opened up their markets to video games.

Those countries are also the reason why Europe is Sonyland: Nintendo and Microsoft came late to the party in these new markets for consoles and Sony had already conquered them by then. South America, especially Brazil, has a similar story to tell, though here it's mostly because only Sony bothered to build consoles there as console imports are ludicrously taxed (over 180% at some point iirc, which pretty much triples the price).

Add to this all the other emerging countries getting the console only after or around the launch of the PS3, and you can see why the PS2 had such a long shelf life, such long sales and such high sales in RoW.

Last edited by Bofferbrauer2 - on 26 May 2020