Famitsu Sales: Week 49, 2025 (Dec 1 - Dec 7)

[Sephiran]

IcaroRibeiro said:

PAOerfulone said:

The same games that Japanese players aren't buying or interested in?

It's not as simple as "Make a handheld and watch them come." You need to give them a reason to care, a reason to be invested long-term...

You need to give them GAMES! 

Otherwise, all they're doing is kicking the can down the road. The Vita's failure had nothing to do with not being able to run current gen games. The 3DS couldn't run current gen games either - Even less so than the Vita. That didn't stop it. Because the 3DS had stuff that no other system had: Exclusives. MAJOR exclusives. A handheld needs its own dedicated, unique library to entice players, otherwise its going to fail. 

Which audience is this handheld supposed to be targeted to? PS5 owners? They'll just get the game on their PS5 (or PS6) and call it a day.

PC Gamers? They'll just get them on their PC or Steam Deck.

Nintendo gamers? Any 3rd party games they want that aren't on Switch 1 or 2 - They'll just get them on any of the other two platforms I just mentioned, or Xbox. 

The decline of third party game sales in Japan is corresponding to a lack of offering to them in handheld form on Sony systems. Some IPs will recover naturally when offered in portable mode

Wii, Wii U, PS4 and PS3 had tons of exclusives and neither sold even 15 million. Playing portable is a huge deal for japanese people, Sony having a portable option is simply a must for japanese market, even if it only to play PS5/PS6 games 

I don't get the downplaying of software being a factor. Doesn't Nintendo benefit heavily from stuff like Pokemon being miles above in popularity than anything Sony have in Japan? Software plays an important role in which platform is popular in different countries. The reason Europe prefers PS5 is because the software on PS5 is more appealing for European markets than what is available on Switch 2, and the same is true for Switch 2 in Japan. Kirby Air Riders will likely be a bigger seller in lifetime sales than anything Sony has released in 5 years in Japan. Nintendo simply has more popular IP in Japan than Sony has. It seems to contradict reality to think that Japanese will care about games like God of War when they play those games on a handheld, and Switch 2 will have such a massive install base in Japan that fairly few popular Japanese third party games will skip Switch 2 to only focus on a PS handheld. Which means Sony would need to be incredibly aggressive in moneyhatting games to skip Switch 2 in the future, and if they started doing that Nintendo would just use their own massive warchest to moneyhat games to skip PS as well.

Last edited by Sephiran - 1 day ago