Sephiran said:
I think it illustrates how weak PS identity and position is in Japan that Xbox series managed to take some market share from PS5 while it mostly declined massively everywhere else. The fact that Xbox series have mostly the same big Japanese third party games as PS5 while also having gamepass was probably all it took for them to gain market share from PS5 in Japan, which shows the danger of being dependant on third party games for the popularity of your ecosystem. |
Wasn't a huge part of that just the PS5 shortages in the early years? I think people forgot that the PS5 was sometimes selling 2-3k a week during its first 2 years.
The growth in Japan being at odds with the rest of the world (40% is huge btw) isn't likely to be explained away with gamepass if the same results weren't seen in way bigger Xbox markets. Exports to elsewhere in Asia probably play a big role too alongside the difficulties in finding PS5 hardware for the first 2 years which was worst in Japan and Spain (where Switch also grew massively/maybe partially as a consequence of shortages)
