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

[Sephiran]

IcaroRibeiro said:

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

This simply isn't true, Sony is an incredible small publisher in Japan:

At retail, Sony as a publisher has this year a 2 % total retail market share in Japan, below publishers like Capcom, Bandai Namco, Square Enix, Konami, Koei Tecmo. And even only counting PS5 sales, this year Sony has a low 15 % retail market share on PS5 in Japan. And sure, those are only retail numbers, but digital ratio don't matter much, because all those publishers that Sony are below also sell games digitally.

Famitsu Top 100: 2025 - nichebarrier.com

And if you look at other years, Sony is a small publisher every single year in Japan. PS software sales are dominated by Japanese third parties in Japan.

Ever since PS1, Japanese has mostly bought PS for Japanese third party games, meaning Sony is in a much more vulnerable position than Nintendo in Japan. Japanese buy Nintendo consoles to play Nintendo games as well as some third party games, Sony games on the other hand has a small market share even on their own console in Japan. Meaning, third party games getting ported to Switch 2 removes a major reason to even buy a PS in Japan. Nintendo has both vastly more popular IP and are now getting more and more third party IP that are popular in Japan as well, which is an enormous competitive advantage. The only way out for Sony is to either find a way to create more popular Sony IP in Japan, or to moneyhat an incredible amount of third party games to skip Switch 2 in the future, like the next Dragon Quest game and so on.

Last edited by Sephiran - on 12 December 2025