Norion said:
The_Liquid_Laser said:
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. |
It's not just about Japan though, there's also RoW and that will make up a much bigger share of Japan + RoW than the former. Even if the PS5 only does about Vita level sales in Japan RoW will still be enough to easily exceed 17m. It'll likely do more than 17m with just RoW so it flopping in Japan doesn't really make much difference to the likelihood of your prediction unless there's indicators of it also doing poorly in RoW in the future. |
Most of RoW has gaming tastes similar to Japan (S. Korea, China, Taiwan, etc...). PS5 will not be popular there either.
