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Sephiran 3 days ago
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IcaroRibeiro said:
Sephiran said:

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.

Hardware is simply as important as software. If you want or need to play in handheld mode there are no games that will convince you to play in stationary mode

The rest of your post ir rather meaningless, because I never said Sony has any chance to sell like Nintendo in Japan, only that offering a handheld option is important for them to start selling a bit better. After all, the last stationary console to sell over 20 million units in Japan was the PS2

Vita with a shit library and no effort whatsoever sold 5.7 million in Japan. This is likely the current "real" PS5 sales in Japan, since it's abundantly clear the current sales are inflated due to imports

I believe a new PS6 and a PS6 portable are key to Sony keep having some significance in JP market. I believe they can coexist like PSP and PS3, just in a smaller scale (10~12 million for the portable, and 4~5 million for the stationary console) 

What i see the reality of the Japanese market:

Nintendo IP is incredibly popular, Sony IP fairly minor. When it comes to third parties, Japanese games dominate the console market in Japan, with fairly low sales for western studios there. That means that the only way for Sony to take meaningful market share from Nintendo in Japan is to aggressively pursue deals to make Japanese third party games exclusive to PS, and to skip Nintendo releases. It means they can't accept a situation where Final Fantasy, Dragon Quest, Resident Evil, Monster Hunter etc come out on Nintendo consoles if they want to be an alternative to Nintendo for more gamers in Japan. Basically Sony would need to recreate a PS1-PS2 era Japan, where every Japanese third party game came out on PS and skipped Nintendo consoles, i don't see that as a realistic future for the Japanese market. For every medium to major Japanese third party game that comes out on Switch 2, that is one less reason for Japanese gamers to buy a PS over a Switch 2. And the fact that Japan has seemingly fewer spec focused gamers than western markets also complicates things for Sony, because the PS handheld being better than the Switch 2 will matter less than the fact that it will also be more expensive than Switch 2 there from a sales perspective.