Everyone keeps saying "Japan's sales are bad" for being worse than they used to be. But this has been going on for so long that we should pretty much expect these sales to be the new normal.

So comments like  "sales poor all around" on the Media Create/Famitsu/Dekenki sales threads always seem odd to me, since the numbers have come to be pretty much expected. A console selling 5K in the summer months and the winning console being ~10K being the normal thing for now sounds hilarious, even to a VGCharts noob like me, but this just seems like reality, until something comes along and changes Japan's market again, like the generation picking up with japan-like games, or something like pay increases or tax changes in the country.

Am I right or do you disagree? And if you do, can you say why in a not trollingly argumentative way?

Home consoles are dead in Japan. It started with ps3. Now mobiles have taken the leaderships.

It's a sad trend. Maybe China will give a lift to the Asian games market and give a needed boost to Japanese games companies.

They're normally bad. Both sides are right.

Yeah, I can see how whether the sales are good or bad for a few people is entirely dependent on the PS4, with 3DS sales instantly being called ovetracked or comparing it to the DS (though we all know comparing PS3 or 4 to PS2 is a sillly endeavour) and Wii U sales downplayed for a million reasons, and Vita ignored entirely.

Still, I'm lead to beleive these are surprisingly low either way, apparently. Though normal now.

It's sad to see that home consoles are almost dead in Japan, but we simply have to deal with it..

This is normal to me because I have not been following Japan's sales when they were "good."

Yeah, I think looking at the Wii U which has a fair chance in all territories I think we can tell that the Japanese console market has shrunk relative to the rest of the world.

Currently the PS4 is not well represented, but if it was and it achieved the same ratio as Wii U, with JP having 35% of US sales then PS4 would be ~15k max.

its not like they dont wanna buy games, but money is tight in japan atm and the youth is shrinking.

In my mind its not bad sales its just the nature of the Japanese market for a number of reasons. The Japanese prefer handheld gaming platforms to home consoles because they spend a lot of the time on the move on subways and buses so they gaming while they travel. Also the homes of Japanese people are usually very small so they don't spend a lot of time at home. All this adds up to less levels of home console sales that the West. Its like that to in the other Asian markets.

The has anybody ever gone back and looked at how console sales were in Japan back 5 or 10 years ago?