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noshten on 04 March 2021
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PS5 software sales will continue to have issues; the two main factors for this are

  • No major titles on the system until Resident Evil: Village which is two months away
  • Scalpers reselling PS5 bought in Japan overseas

From my perspective without major PS5 titles, there is no reason to purchase software - you can buy second hand PS4 games and play those. Considering the software line-up the people buying PS5 are hardcore enthusiasts who might already have a pretty large library of PS4 games.  

While scalpers elevate the problem by effectively removing part of the potential audience, if even 1/5 of the hardware is being sold overseas for profit it means that 1/5 of the audience is actually not there to purchase physical software in Japan. 

Overall  PlayStation Ecosystem makes up less than 5% of new software sales this year, this is due to a lack of any major titles in 2021, if we look further back into PS4/PS5 software sales since October the picture is very clear, the only games that surpassed 100K are Cold War & Cyberpunk 2077. Cold War saw further decline for the franchise in Japan, while Cyberpunk 2077 was a buggy mess that was unable to sell it's initial shipment. After December the highest selling new game on the PlayStation Ecosystem is Disgaea 6 with 18K sales... 

Top 10 PS4/PS5 Games October till Resident Evil: Village

  1. [PS4/PS5] Call of Duty: Black Ops - Cold War (November) - 173.463
  2. [PS4] Cyberpunk 2077 (December) - 115.813
  3. [PS4] Sakuna: Of Rice and Ruin (November) - 77.240
  4. [PS4/PS5] Marvel's Spider-Man: Miles Morales (November) - 70.425
  5. [PS4/PS5] Assassin's Creed: Valhalla (October) - 65.572
  6. [PS4] Shin Megami Tensei III (October) - 62.511
  7. [PS4] Dragon Quest XI S (December) - 61.063
  8. [PS4] FIFA 21 (October) - 60.129
  9. [PS4] Watch Dogs: Legion (October) - 56.656
  10. [PS4] Atelier Ryza 2 (December) - 51.861

Nothing is charting because there is nothing to chart... I also don't think Village will manage more than 50K sales on the PS5 and the franchise will further decline across the PS4/PS5 ending with around 150K to 200K lifetime sales. 

The line-up and supply for Japan so far is abysmal, and now the PS5 faces much fiercer competition for Third Party support compared to the PS4/PS3 launches.