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Forums - Sales Discussion - Famitsu sales: Week 33, 2021 - (9th August - 15th August)

Agente42 on 23 August 2021
brute said:
RolStoppable said:

The official PS5 launch in China happened in May, but the weekly shipments to the country are too low to fulfill demand.

I doubt that Sony is oblivious to the situation in Japan where hardware is being sold, but hardly any software goes with it. Yet they continue to ship a number of PS5 units to Japan that notably exceeds demand. The physical tie ratio for the PS5 in Japan is ~0.4 while digital sales account for 50% of all software sales at best (the actual figure is most likely lower); so the best case scenario after nine months is that the PS5 has a tie ratio of ~0.8 in Japan. But even the routinely slow-starting PS software in Japan should have reached a tie ratio of about 1.5 by now. So what's going on? Likely around half of the PS5 hardware units that have been sold in Japan so far have left the country afterwards to be sold/used elsewhere. There's no better explanation for these Japanese hardware and software sales that don't match.

I assume that Sony knows what's going on, but doesn't adjust allocations in order to boost their standing in Japan. A lot of notable third party publishers are located in Japan, so having somewhat good PS5 hardware sales is important to foster development support. Based on PS5 software sales, hardware shipments of ~5k per week would have been sufficient a long time ago. The PS4 had many sub-10k weeks in its first year and that was with better software sales, so a weekly baseline of ~5k for the PS5 is far from unthinkable.

Not only does it boost their standing in Japan but the folks buying the exported consoles are likely to buy games digitally since physical software wont be as available, or in some cases, available at all.

It'll help Sony push the idea of a digital only future.

Japanese consumers only enter the digital world when the physical (including game cards) runs out. The digital proportion in Japan is low. It has video game stores, small and medium, distributed in the main prefectures.



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curl-6 on 23 August 2021
Valdney said:
curl-6 said:

Japanese studios can support the Switch while still selling outside Japan. The West loves the Switch as well and the Nintendo crowd tend to like Japanese fare more so than say, the Xbox base.

Rise has done extremely well not just in Japan but worldwide, while success has also been found by the likes of Octopath Traveler and Sakuna.

Very true. Octopath Traveler was the best selling game in the USA the month it came out. There’s definitely a market for “smaller” Japanese games in the west, specially in places like the USA, Mexico and Brazil.  

I'd say there is a market for Japanese games big and small on Switch, as we have seen the likes of Octopath joined by MH Rise which is a major production.

If the rumored new RE game for Switch is real that will almost certainly sell well too, both in Japan and the West.

The Switch has built a base that is not just large but diverse as well, allowing many different kinds of games to thrive.

Last edited by curl-6 - on 24 August 2021