Sephiran said:
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. |
Sony is actually the second biggest publisher in Japan right now. Their games sells well with Ghost, Spider Man, Gran Turismo, etc
The only bigger third parties I can think of are Monster Hunter, Final Fantasy and Dragon Quest. They lost Square, but the sales had already crumbled even when FF was exclusive
What hinders Sony IPs to grown is the lack of them in handheld form
Sony already had its "PS1-era lite" with PS4. So many Japanese exclusive games and yet they got destroyed by 3DS and Switch
The simple answer is Japan like handhelds systems. With a handheld system Sony will grown again
