Famitsu Sales: Week 51, 2023 (Dec 11 - Dec 17)

[The_Liquid_Laser]

Software sales are doing well.  No new games were released this week, but 13.5k is the floor for the top 10.  Mario Wonder is selling almost 100k this week and it's several weeks after release, which is great.

Hardware in Japan makes no sense.  People are predicting how much Switch or PS5 will sell next year, which I find funny.  They might be right or might not.  It's a total shot in the dark really.  The Switch is selling well for its seventh year, but it's not doing nearly as well as earlier this year.  Perhaps this is what normal is supposed to look like for Switch sales, and it was simply weird earlier in the year?  That seems to be the most likely case to me.

PS5 sales have absolutely nothing to do with reality.  In 2021 and 2022, PS5 software sales were abysmal compared to how hardware was selling.  Now in 2023, PS5 hardware seems to be selling great, and yet software sales are terrible.  Looking at YTD sales, PS5 hardware sales are about 2.5 times higher this year compared to last year.  And yet there is no PS5 title in the top 10.  Once we get the top 30, the picture will not be much better with something like 1-3 PS5 titles.  I would not be surprised if we get at least one week during the holidays with 0 PS5 titles like in previous years.  In short, PS5 software sales have been terrible since the beginning and they continue to be terrible this year, even while hardware sales are spiking. 

Who knows how many PS5's will sell during any given week?  Does it even matter?  Hardware is normally a simple way to reflect how successful a system is, but the PS5 is not successful.  Software sales are dramatically worse than Wii U.  I would be interested in how PS5 software compares to the XBox 360 in Japan.  That is how terrible PS5 software is selling.  It is XBox levels of terrible.  And yet hardware keeps going like everything is great, which it isn't.