Sony prioritizing US audience for PS5 reveal because Japan is losing interest

[DonFerrari]

Shadow1980 said:

Well, it is true that the home console market isn't what it used to be in Japan, for reasons that are not entirely clear (probably a combination of social & economic factors and an increased focus on Western audiences for AAA software development). It had actually peaked in Gen 5, with Gen 6 being down slightly (though that was almost entirely on Sega's end). The last "pure" home console to sell over 15M units was the PS2. While the Wii was Nintendo's best-selling home console ever in the U.S. and Europe, in Japan it fell well short of both the NES and SNES.

PlayStation has also suffered a lot. As we can see, the PS3 didn't even sell half of what the PS2 did. The PS4 is tracking to sell slightly less than the PS3, even though nearly everywhere else the PS4 has already far outsold the PS3.

Only three games have sold over a million copies on the PS4 to date: Monster Hunter World, Dragon Quest XI, and Final Fantasy XV (FF7R is next behind them at 919k sold so far, and it is followed by Kingdom Hearts III at 861k). Outside of a few big-name Japanese franchises, many of which have declined in popularity in their home country, there aren't that many big draws on PlayStation anymore for Japanese audiences. And almost all the most popular games on the PS4 are third-party titles. The best selling first-party PS4 title in Japan is Knack(!), with only 400k copies sold, which puts it at #16 among all PS4 games.

But the Switch is different. It's not a pure home console. It's a hybrid. That handheld aspect is almost certainly the reason why it's been doing well. While it's been selling more slowly than the 3DS, that's almost certainly attributable to being more expensive than the 3DS, and FWIW the gap between the two is shrinking (the 3DS was relatively front-loaded, while the Switch is much less so). Its games have been selling very well. It already has ten million-sellers. The new Animal Crossing is already one of the best-selling games ever in Japan, and has already outsold every home console title except Super Mario Bros. And the Switch's best-selling games are almost all first-party titles. The only million-seller that isn't a Nintendo title is Minecraft at 1.4M sold, and it's followed by the Switch port of Dragon Quest XI, which has so far sold about 523k copies.

For whatever reason, Japanese gamers just don't care as much for conventional consoles as they used to (they still like handhelds, though), and as long at that remains the case, PlayStation will not be as relevant in Japan as they once were. That will likely further encourage Sony to focus more on North America and Europe, leaving third parties to provide games that still do decently in Japan.

I knew we could count on you to bring good data to support the discussion. And as we said, there isn't a definitive conclusion on why it is declining, but traditional/table consoles have been in decline in Japan for a long time.