Famitsu 2020 Switch Top 25:
TOTAL: 11.660.788
Nintendo - 9.394.875
Pokemon Co. - 982.440
Other - 1.283.473
Famitsu 2020 PS4 Top 25
- Final Fantasy VII Remake (Square) - 932.821
- Ghost of Tsushima (Sony) - 362.354
- Resident Evil 3 (Capcom) - 258.676
- Yakuza 7: Like a Dragon (Sega) - 243.769
- The Last of Us Part II (Sony) - 222.943
- eBaseball Powerful Pro Baseball 2020 (Konami) - 170.534
- Mobile Suit Gundam: Extreme Vs. MaxiBoost On (Bandai) - 155.623
- Persona 5 Scramble: The Phantom Strikers (Atlus) - 149.898
- Dragon Ball Z: Kakarot (Bandai) - 149.654
- Trials of Mana (Square) - 133.593
- One Piece: Pirate Warriors 4 (Bandai) - 131.315
- Granblue Fantasy Versus (Cygames) - 111.094
- Sword Art Online: Alicization Lycoris (Bandai) - 85.010
- Grand Theft Auto V: Premium Online Edition (Take-Two) - 54.860
- Romance of the Three Kingdoms 14 (Koei) - 33.644
- Remnant: From the Ashes (DMM Games) - 24.150
- Katanakami (Spike Chunsoft) - 17.599
- Fairy Tail (Koei) - 15.344
- Predator: Hunting Grounds (Sony) - 13.019
- The Legend of Heroes: Trails of Azure - Kai (Nihon Falcom) - 12.047
- Winning Post 9 2020 (Koei) - 10.528
- Street Fighter V: Champion Edition (Capcom) - 8.705
- Kandagawa Jet Girls (Marvelous) - 7.749
- Bayonetta & Vanquish (Sega) - 7.397
- Mega Man Zero/ZX Legacy (Capcom) - 7.235
TOTAL: 3.319.561
- Bandai - 4
- Capcom, Sony, Koei - 3
- Square & Sega - 2
- Konami, Atlus, Cygames, Take Two, Marvelous, DMM Games, Nihon Falcom, Spike Chunsoft - 1
Exclusive to the PS4: 18
Exclusive 3rd Party games on PS4 Top 25: 15
Exclusive 3rd Party games on Switch Top 25: 4
With low initial install base and anemic sales this year on the PS4, it's looking increasingly likely that we will see the Playstation Ecosystem sell below 7M units of physical software. This is actually the first year I expect 3rd Parties to sell more on the Switch compared to the Playstation 4 & 5. So far there is no notable exclusive coming on the PS5 for the fall that could move a large number of sales and push the system.
I find it hard to point to a game launching the rest of the year on the Playstation 4 and 5 that could move over 400K units.
Despite this fact, we will notice that a large number of games haven't been ported to the Switch and can only be bought on the PS4. The majority of these outsides of Final Fantasy, Yakuza, Resident Evil are games that are selling between 10K to 200K units. These are AA Japanese 3rd Party games and next year I don't foresee a lot of these types of titles being exclusive to the PS4/PS5.
These were the numbers for last year according to Media Create, these include all titles launched not just Top 25 titles:
Switch 2019:
Nintendo - 7.585.954
Pokemon Co. - 3.115.023
Other - 5.939.643
All publishers - 16.646.620
PS4 2019:
Sony Interactive Entertainment - 1.284.234
Other - 7.951.099
All publishers - 9.235.333
As we can see PS4/PS5 software sales are trending to drop and end up between 6-7M while if Monster Hunter Switch ends up dropping we might see 3rd Party sales on the Switch easily surpass 8M. The lowest selling title on the Top 25 currently on the Switch has over 78K sales, while on the PS4 we start at about 10K. The writing is on the wall for the PS5, PS4 was lucky to launch in a time where Nintendo basically faced a huge decline going from DS->3DS and Wii->Wii U.
Right now Playstation ecosystem is competing with a dominant force and it cannot count on a large number of Japanese 3rd Party exclusive titles to differentiate itself from the Switch. It will continue to get the AAA exclusivity for the likes of Resident Evil, Final Fantasy, Kingdom Hearts, Yakuza, Persona, Nier and new IPs aiming for AAA but that strategy will also need to be revisited by Square, Capcom, Atlus and Sega at some point. There is simply no way to allow your biggest franchises to fade into obscurity at their home nation, so by 2023 I expect at least 2/3 of those big franchises to make their way to the Switch.
Next year we will likely see something like 80-20 Software sales for 3rd Parties on the Switch simply by the virtue the console will be over 20M units sold by the end of 2021. Also if the rumored revision comes out we might be looking at a much lower hardware drop from 2020 for the Switch, Breath of the Wild 2, Switch Pro, price cuts for Lite and OG, if those all hit the end of FY it all depends on fall line-up if the Switch can actually see over >12M hardware sales for the two year period. We are heading towards 6.5 to 7.5 million for this year, I don't see the Switch dropping below 6M in 2021.
In the meantime, PS4 had sold only 2.2M by the end of 2015 and 4M by the end of 2016. By the end of 2021, the PS5 will most likely be below 2M making it a very hard sell for any AA Japanese games Sony isn't paying for. The size and price are a difficult barrier and competition with the Switch will be brutal for the Playstation in Japan, but more worrying for Sony is the numbers that recently came out of Taiwan and South Korea if this is playing out across Asia.. well Europe and North America will be the only potential large video game markets where Sony would be competitive.
This will have long term ramifications, at the end of the day, the main issue Sony had was exiting the portable space allowing Nintendo to consolidate that market and attract a lot of smaller studios both in Japan and outside of Japan. These small studios & indies that basically made up a large amount of the support during the first few years on the Switch ensured that even though large Japanese 3rd Parties never took the device seriously it had enough 3rd party support. As I've said I feel that Human Fall Flat has probably sold more copies in Japan(digitally) than the vast majority of Japanese 3rd Party titles.
I can understand Sony and other big companies for not wanting to compete against Mobile while also supporting AAA consoles, but it might be problematic with AAA games costing so much these days that one commercial failure can pretty much cripple a very large company. Simply put having both AA and AAA allows you to at least stay afloat in such a scenario. For example, Level 5 is missing entirely from the Top 25 on Nintendo and Playstation but via eShop sales, they might be able to cover their bills. Their AAA efforts failed and so did their mobile efforts if they didn't have the money they had saved up from their AA efforts(in which I include Yo-Kai 3DS games, Snack World, etc) and didn't have some titles to sell digitally right now they would probably go bankrupt.
Last edited by noshten - on 29 August 2020
