RolStoppable said:
VGC regulars may know about barneystinson69 who is prohibited from creating political threads because he tended to inject an aggressive and shortsighted agenda into everything he posted. He has gotten around it by asking others to post political threads for him. Now you might think "Damn, what a sly fox!", but others merely posted the news without injecting any agenda, so it was ultimately pretty pointless for barney to do so. This thread right here exists for a similar reason and that's what makes things interesting. Why? Because it's my thread.
Forza Motorsport 7 charted at the very backend of Media Create - this tracker provides a weekly top 50, only the top 20 have their exact sales displayed - and has been the first Xbox One game to do so in a while. #20 in the Media Create charts sold just over 4k copies during this tracking period, so it's safe to say that Forza Motorsport 7 didn't even sell 4k units in its debut week. The game totally bombed in Japan.
"Rol, us Xbox guys have written off Xbox One in Japan three years ago already, so why beat a dead horse?"
While you now might object to the above statement because I used plural to describe the Xbox fanbase on VGC, let us focus on what matters. Xbox One is dead in the water in Japan. Xbox as a brand is a lost cause in Japan. Essentially, it's pointless to talk about Xbox any longer. Therefore we'll take a closer look at the rest of the Japanese market, the other 99.9%.
Switch is off to a hot start, sitting at 1.78m after seven months since launch. There's little reason to worry about Switch's future in the country, especially once you factor in that Japan still feels the pain of shortages and therefore Switch's current LTD could have been higher than the actual total. The 3DS is slowly on its way out and Switch is taking over without any interruption to Nintendo's strong position in Japan. Where does that leave PlayStation?
The PS4 - commonly said to have excellent sales in Japan - is currently tracking at peak year performance which could result in 2m units sold this year alone, bringing it close to LTD sales of 6m after just under four years on the market. Probably doesn't sound impressive after you've read about Switch's numbers, a console that is just getting started and already beating around the PS4 like an Xbox. It sounds even less impressive once you consider how healthy the retail release schedule has been for the PS4 and how barren it has been for Switch. The position for PlayStation in Japan becomes even more worrisome once you factor in that Sony is refusing to make another portable console. It already seems like a foregone conclusion that PlayStation will do worse in generation 9 (PS5) than in generation 8 (PS4 + PSV), after already seeing a significant decline in gen 8 which couldn't/won't match up to gen 7 (PS3 + PSP).
What this means in the big picture is that Nintendo's trajectory of absorbing Sony's third party support - a trend that started with the DS in generation 7 - is bound to continue. More and more Japanese developers and publishers are running out of options to refrain from developing for a Nintendo console.
Is PlayStation going to become the next Xbox in Japan? No. But Sony isn't doing anything to adjust to the market conditions, so it's fair to conclude that they are ceding a large chunk of the market to Nintendo without putting up any fight because they know they can't compete.
|
