RolStoppable said:
The PS4 sold more units than the Vita, so an inherent immense advantage for handhelds does not exist. Rather it's an often used excuse to explain away Nintendo's continued success in the country while it frames Sony's situation as being one that is out of Sony's control. Moving interest has first and foremost to do with the quality of game libraries, because with that explanation you achieve logical consistence across hardware form factors and generations. The PS4 sold more than the Vita because it had a better game library than it, the 3DS sold more than the Wii U for the same reason, Switch will handily beat the PS5 for the same reason. It obviously helps Switch that is both home console and handheld console, because the flexibility in how you can play the system is an inherent value, but the most important factor for its success is its robust game library. That's why its sales can keep up with the 3DS and will soon pass it launch-aligned despite a notably higher price point and far fewer revisions over the comparable timeframe. If you go further back in the generations, you have the DS and PSP which first made handhelds have higher hardware market share than home consoles. Both of them had much more quality and quantity in their game libraries than previous handhelds because game development costs on home consoles had hit a breaking point, forcing many developers to examine their opportunities elsewhere. The generation before (PS2, GC, GBA) didn't have this issue, so the PS2 had it easy to amass a much bigger game library than Nintendo's consoles. Unsurprisingly, every generation before 2000 played out the same way. In a way the form factor of hardware does matter a lot in Japan, but it's not that Japanese gamers have something against playing games on TVs, rather it's that the evergrowing game development costs caused a change to the previous reality that home consoles would get the lion share of the software, and then gamers followed the games. This can once again be observed with Switch sales where the hybrid SKU has comfortably outsold the Lite and the only reason for the Lite's competitiveness was prolonged limited stock for the hybrid SKU. If handhelds were what Japan inherently prefers to play on, then the Lite should sell far better due to its price. |
The Vita's sales are a good point. I was thinking that due to the PS3 declining a lot that showed a move of interest away from home consoles but then after thinking about it some more the PS3 declined everywhere, a bigger decline percentage wise in Japan but not that much more. There is the Wii and how it didn't do as well in Japan compared to north America and Europe but it might've just not caught on as much there as it did in the west. Since the top 3 and eventually top 4 best selling systems of all time in Japan will be handheld devices and how massive mobile gaming is in that country there is some of level preference for handheld devices for gaming I'd say but game library and how appealing the hardware is are the biggest factors so a hybrid system with a strong library will offer the most appeal to Japanese customers.
