Famitsu Sales: Week 52 & 53, 2023 (Dec 18 - Dec 31)

[DonFerrari]

Phenomajp13 said:

DonFerrari said:

Your own words "the reasons its bad to you is irrelevant to the market". That seem pretty much claiming I said it, is that lying or dishonest?

Considering Sony own documentation it should be about 50% or higher digital, so if you have physical sales you could double that number to have a general idea of total (sure some titles will be much different from that, and for indies and the like well it is 100% digital and don't even show in charts), but again I was just pointing out why looking only at the rank of physical sales don't give you total SW sold by the system at all.

The sales Shtinamin posted is only for the titles that ranked (you can even see that he put "min"), so it doesn't cover all the titles launched for PS5 over there. I'll keep waiting for you to provide credible sources for total sales of SW by PS4 and PS5 launch aligned in Japan.

By the time those numbers were posted PS4 wasn't dead (The article https://www.tweaktown.com/news/79015/ps4-is-the-king-of-software-with-1-5-billion-games-sold-dethrones-ps2/index.html is from Apr/2021 so not even 6 months after PS5 launch), and that is why I said that it is quite possible that the attach ratio grew since them to be closer to 15. 

PS4 was about 8 years old by the time of that 13.34, and Switch is 7 years old. Do you think Switch will climb from 8,6 to 13 in a year?

From Sony site you would have the attach ratio of 9.4 for PS1, 9.9 for PS2, 11.43 for PS3 all truly dead systems (https://sonyinteractive.com/en/our-company/business-data-sales/)

For PS5 attach ratio I'll look into the yearly of PS4 first to see how the attach ratio evolved (even though that site is missing the data of SW for 2013 up to 2015, I'll get that from their yearly reports, the first years will likely be a little less precise, but bear with me).

2013 LTD 7.6M HW and 384M SW total (no PS4 only data) so if we would consider 10% of that to be for PS4 we would get 38M -> 5 attach ratio

2014 LTD 22.4M and 460M SW sold that year let's consider that it was 20% for PS4 92M+38M(2013) -> 5.8 attach ratio

2015 LTD 40.1M and 158.7M SW (from the link of 1.5B total, so I'll consider that as lump of the previous years together) -> 3.95

2016 (now we have both from Sony) LTD 60.1M and 234.2M+158.7= 392.9M->6.5

2017 LTD 79.1M and 274.2M+392.9M=667.1->8.43 (so on 4th full year it was equal to Switch)

2018 LTD 96.9M and 292.7M+667.1M=959.8M -> 9.9

2019 LTD 110.4M and 276.1+959.8M=1.236B -> 11.2

2020 (let's call this the last alive year if you want?) LTD 116.1M and SW 173.2+1.236 = 1.4B ->12.06 (7th full year on the market)

2021 (to match the 1.562B SW and 117.1M HW) -> 13.34

Of course none of those numbers is 100% precise, even more because Sony didn't give specifics every year for each system. But we can use it to get a ballpark?

Let's do a similar exercise for PS5

2020 LTD 7.8M and 165.6M SW (and we are going to use the same very low 10% distribution) so 16.6 M -> 2.13 attach ratio

2021 LTD 19.3M and 303.2M SW (and 20% of that for PS5) so 60.6M+16.6M= 77.2M -> 4 attach ratio

2022 LTD 38.4M and 264.2M SW (here let's use 50% for PS5) so 132.1M+77.2M= 209.3M -> 5.45

2023 LTD 46.6M and 124.1M SW (from here on we can go for all on PS5) so 124.1+309.3M -> 9.3

(on this period I have been very conservative for PS5 SW sales, because total SW sold would be 857,1M and we saw that for most reports we had when a crossgen title was available more sales were on PS5 than PS4 even with its userbase being much smaller, you can also see that from the MAU it is about 50M PS5 and 70M PS4 - even though it had 117M sold -> this would mean that I'm only giving PS5 36% of total SW sold on PS since it launch, very small proportion but would be one year ahead of PS4 on attach ratio and already above Switch and that is without considering that all PS4 titles can be played on PS5)

https://www.nintendo.co.jp/ir/pdf/2023/230509_3e.pdf Nintendo count the digital sales (they don't provide to Circana and the like), so the about 1B sold SW is counting digital.

Now I'm back to wait you providing credible source for total SW sold by PS4 and PS5 per year in Japan.

My bad on the first part, I didn't mean it that way just an example of things being subjective for many different reasons (power, convenience). Software sales being lower than WiiU and Vita is objective. Even with PS market being 50% for example, that would only match WiiU. Don't you think that should still be considered bad? Or do we now consider matching WiiU an accomplishment? 

As for the source, I asked and I would have to link to the forum because the date was compiled using data from Mediacreate among other sources, would that be allowed? This is getting pointless though because you are just using the good old "we don't have the full data, so no definitive things can be stated" escuse. The PS5's performance in the top 30 on a weekly basis is attorcious, no way to spin that. It has sold more than enough hardware to have competing software. Do you think Switch 2 will struggle this mightly in its first couple weeks? It's userbase will be lower than PS5s, so its software should do just as poorly I guess. 

Great data, only issue is that you also said Xbox had better attach ratios (which you didn't bother to compare) and regardless the only thing you proved was poorer selling consoles like PS3 and PS4 have higher attach ratios. Simple math could have taught you that, the denomiator in a fraction/ratio is higher for higher selling consoles because the denominator is the hardware base. Switch will definitely challenge PS1 and PS2, also PS3 will not be out of reach at the end of its life. So is Switch mediocre in attach ratios due to just PS4? PS5 isn't mediocre in Japan software sales just because of Switch, I have been comparing to Vita and WiiU which are the bottom of the barrel. Also, you are incorrect about digital only games being included in Switch total software. Games with physical and digital releases are included in Switch total software but games that were only released on eshop are not included. I assume Nintendo does this because they are likely very cheap (mobile like games) and contribute low revenue. I don't know for sure though, but every Nintendo quarterly thread I have read has this notation. So Switch is certainly missing a chunk of software that Sony includes. What do you think the Switch's attach ratio will finish at (according to Nintendo's data, so not including the unknown digital only games)?

If total SW of PS5 is lower than PS4 yes I would consider it bad since WW it seems to be slightly better (independent of digital attach ratio), the problem is we don't have the data to claim it.

You think looking at the ranking is enough and I told you that if you looked at the Switch rank of million sellers you would have only 7 3rd parties, that would say that 3rd party sales is basically non-existent, would you agree with that? If not, why do you think looking at the 30 rank will tell the full story and show close to full sales of PS5 SW sales? In Europe a lot of big IPs were quite low on the annual rank. FF16 (32), NBA (33), Dead Island 2 (35), Starfield (37), The Crew (38), Avatar (48), MK1 (53), Just Dance (82), SF6 (98), all those would be lost on a top 30 but didn't sell poorly at all.

For the top 20 of 2023 on Switch for Circana (Americas) there is only 1 3rd party title.

PS attach ratio have been increasing each gen PS2 sold 50% more than PS1 and still had a bigger attach ratio, PS4 sold 30% more than PS3 and have a substancial increase in attach ratio to PS3. Yes the bigger the userbase the most likely lower attach ratio due to more casuals. Regarding X360 the data was here on the site for a long time https://www.vgchartz.com/charts/platform_totals/TieRatio.php dunno the level of imprecision (because of the increase in digital sales they stopped tracking sometime during past gen, but for PS360 era those numbers were considered credible) and as you can see X360 was bigger than PS3. For other Xbox platforms I won't bother going through reports as MS isn't very transparent and any source would be indirect or trying to sum from leaks and so if you want to think it suddenly stopped being of the 10-12 range ok. But if you look the link you'll see that generally Nintendo attach ratio is lower than the other 3 and if you look for the portables they are much much lower than the consoles.

Switch 2 most likely won't have issue selling SW in Japan, if it is a successful system with similar portable focus it will keep a strong position in Japan. 

If you look at page 13 of their report (https://www.nintendo.co.jp/ir/pdf/2023/230509_3e.pdf) you'll see that for digital sales they count digital only titles -"Sales of downloadable versions of packaged software, download-only software, add-on content and Nintendo Switch Online, etc"

I would think Switch will close its lifetime near 10 attach ratio.