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Otter on 01 December 2021
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RolStoppable said:

We can derive from first year sales of the Vita and the PS4 that less than a million Japanese gamers would have wanted a PS5 during year 1, based on the PS5 lineup not being any more appealing than its predecessor's. If Japanese gamers were truly interested in the PS5, then there would be more effort from their side to get one and more effort from retailers to sell to Japanese gamers, because that way the retailers could sell games too.

We know that PS5's bought in Japan are exported afterwards, so it should go without saying that numbers from lotteries are inflated too.

curl-6 said:

I'm not sure I've ever bought into the notion that low supply increases sales. That one was often used against the Wii back in like 2007/2008 I recall, and even the Switch.

And I'm pretty sure several tech companies have said the chip shortage will persist into 2023 anyway.

You misunderstood my post. Too low supply in countries with actually high demand for the PS5 has resulted in PS5 consoles being bought in Japan for the sole purpose of being exported into countries where people want to own them (primarily mainland Asia and South America). This is why PS5 hardware and PS5 software sales in Japan are so out of sync with each other.

The situation is going to come to an end by either global demand being met or Sony stopping to ship more PS5s to Japan than there's demand for them among Japanese gamers. Due to the chip shortages the latter is more likely to happen sooner.

Isn't the lottery system the effort to cut  out scalpers and sell to genuine consumers? What more can retailers do? Either way we know that plenty of real consumers are struggling to get their hands on it even if the demand (which is much higher than supply) is inflated. Overseas markets willing to pay more/having higher demand, doesn't mean that the demand domestically is absent.

We can guess at the real demand by software lineup but that's extremely sketchy and wouldn't take into account a more front loaded adoption preference from playstation audiences, even if the audience was similar in size/ shrinking. Software wise similar arguments have been made in the west about "lack of software/exclusives" but demand far outpaces predecessor's at this point for both playstation/xbox.

The sharp drop off in PS4 software sales exactly at the arrival of PS5 indicates to me a strong portion of the audience eager to move on to the new platform (similar to whats seen in the west). PS5s baseline could be 10k or it could be 30k, I look forward to us actually being able to see it but that'll be a while off and until then all software sales tell us is that there is higher demand outside of Japan, but that doesn't answer what demand is like in Japan.