Famitsu Sales: Week 27, 2022 (Jun 27 - Jul 03)

[The_Liquid_Laser]

Norion said:

The_Liquid_Laser said:

I expect them to finish the year at 6.8m LTD total.  After that annual sales look something like this (in millions).

Year	Japan + RoW	LTD
20-22	6.8	6.8
2023	1.8	8.6
2024	1.6	10.2
2025	1.3	11.5
2026	1	12.5
2027+	3	15.5

I expect a big drop next year, and then Sony will respond with price cuts and bundles in 2024 and later to reduce the annual % drops.  (Please note that RoW does not include any of the Americas.)  Feel free to post your own annual breakdown, so we can compare sales predictions.

2023 being sub 2m is a wild prediction considering how much sales would have to suddenly decline after this year for that to happen. I'm not fully sure of my own annual breakdown but to give an attempt I expect something a lot more similar to this.

2022: 7m

2023: 10m

2024: 14m

2025: 17

2026: 19-20

2027+ 25-26m

This would be a notable decline from the PS4 but not to a nearly 50% degree since there's nothing indicating it'll decline anywhere close to that. When even the PS3 can achieve 26m Japan + RoW I don't see a world in which the PS5 falls under 20m since its sales pace so far very much indicates higher than that.

There are several indicators that PS5 will do very poorly.  However, if you are only looking at hardware numbers you won't see them.  These are more qualitative factors rather than simply looking at hardware quantities.  Here are the indicators:

-PS5 software sales are terrible, worse than the Wii U, godawful terrible
-The Switch, it's main competitor, is setting software records including the best selling game of all time in Japan, Animal Crossing
-Number of software releases continues to rise each year on Switch.  Last year number of titles released on Switch and Playstation were about the same.  In the coming years we should expect Switch to get more titles per year than Playstation.
-Playstation brand in Japan has been weakening for quite a while now.  PS4 had probably the best software lineup a home console could get in Japan, and sales still declined compared to PS3.  PS5's software situation will not be nearly so strong and it has a much tougher than the PS4 had in the Wii U. 
-Sony has basically abandoned Japan.  They closed their studio in Japan, discontinued the Vita, and now just focus on making home console games for the West.

These qualitative factors are actually more important than early hardware numbers.  It can be hard to know what is going on based purely on hardware data with a chip shortage and scalpers affecting sales numbers.  But if you just take a step back and look at qualitative factors, then you can assess whether a system is going to be great or a turd before it even hits the market.  For Generation 8, it was quite possible to predict the Wii U was going to flop and the PS4 was going to be a runaway success just based on their E3 presentations (and also XB1's presentation).  By the same token, it should be obvious (especially by now) the PS5 is not going to do well in Japan.  Software sales are terrible.  The competition is too strong.  There are a lot of chips stacked against the PS5.