Sony seems to be basically waving the white flag in Japan at this point.
I get that they're prioritizing the West, but if we assume that shipped = sold, not even having 2k consoles available in the whole country during a holiday season week is not a good sign, nor is the absence of a single PS5 game from the top 30 software more than a year after launch.

It's all well and good to focus on your biggest market, but putting so little effort into a still significant market where you used to sell over 20 million units per system and have a very competitive software presence doesn't seem wise.

Furthermore, the "In the West" argument loses luster when you remember that Nintendo is just as dominant and has just as strong of a presence in the West as Sony does. PlayStation may have the edge in Europe. But in North America? Out of the Top 10 best selling systems of all time, 6 of them are Nintendo, including the Switch and the #1 selling system of all time, the DS, the Wii is also #4, so they had 2 of the Top 5 best selling systems in North America in the SAME generation! But back to the Switch, it is just 2 million and change away from passing the PS4, with no signs of slowing down.

So Japanese devs could get just as many sales as they would get on PlayStation in the West, while also getting missing sales from the homeland by just making games on Nintendo. So a lot of the Japanese 3rd party devs that used to make games exclusively for PlayStation hardware are now going either multiplat or Nintendo exclusive. At this rate, it may only be a matter of time before we see a new mainline Final Fantasy or Kingdom Hearts get made and released on Nintendo alongside PlayStation.

Putting all their eggs in the 'In the West' basket was the worst thing Sony could have done. Because they have effectively surrendered Japan to Nintendo (the first sign of this was when they left the handheld market after the Vita's failure). The abandonment of Japanese devs for the system will eventually have a trickle effect to the other regions. And with Microsoft closing ground and gaining momentum in the US + the Japanese home console market shrinking to the point of irrelevancy, that complete global advantage they had during the PS1 and PS2 eras is gone. 

there is also the matter of the fact that, for anyone trying to sell consoles from abroad and sell them somewhere else, japan is the obvious choice. buying a japanese console and selling it in somewhere like, say, india or brazil means that you would profit even without really going to the rediculous prices scalpers go to.... and with scalping, its pure profit if you manage to sell it. the software attachment rate tells me that a lot of japanese ps5's are going to SEA or china.

China, Brazil, and other countries. 

• Asia is one of Playstation's fastest growing areas so that's wrong.
• A lot of the best selling PS4 games are Playstation first party so that's wrong again.
• Also you've completely misread why Playstation dominates MS and Nintendo globally: they are the biggest gaming store/network by far. PSN alone made more revenue than the entirety of Nintendo in many years and PS4 sold 300M software in one year. PS4 has sold more software than any other console in history.

Exclusives help initially, but Playstation does not mind them going multiplatform because Playstation still gets 70-80% of all console sales of nearly every third party title. 50% of Fornites revenue came from PS4. No other console or PC client comes close to how many games and microtransactions are bought through Playstation bar the Apple App store.

Like I said, Playstation could disappear from Japan and still nearly every single Japanese third party will support them because Playstation fans are the majority buyers of nearly every single Japanese third party game.

And that's not even the case. PS4 sold near 10 million and 50-70M in software, which is plenty for JP devs in a region that accounts

Switch is underpowered by 2 gens at this point. The entire video game industry, tens of thousands of developers, aren't all going to say, lets all go back 8 years in tech, scale back all our games just to appease Japan.  

Especially in a time where technological advancement is increasing in pace, with more powerful chips needed for ray tracing, higher resolution, frame rate and the computing paradigm that is AR/VR.

DS did more than the SW yet most global publishers focused on cutting edge tech to advance the medium and made a killing with online titles.

• Missing the point. I'm saying Japan is <10% for many JP franchises. JP publishers are not going to abandon PS or even go multiplat just because they are losing <5% sales.

• SE : FF15, FF7R, FF14, KH3, Nier, Octopath, Bravely Default ~ 85-90% overseas
• CAPCOM : RE, SF, Dragons Dogma, MvC, DMC, ~ 90% overseas
• NB : Naruto, DB, Tales, Tekken, Ace Combat, SoulCaliber, Ni No Kuni, Code Vein, ~ 90% overseas
• SEGA : Persona, Catherine, Sonic, Valkyria Chronicles, Total War, Football manager ~ 90% overseas
• KT : Nioh, KTs best selling game of all time ~ 90% overseas
• FROM SOFTWARE : Souls, Bloodborne, Elden Ring ~ 90% overseas

These are the biggest JP publishers and nearly all their games get their sales from overseas. The fact that you have to resort to extremely niche companies (even then Danganronpa sold most overseas, pretty sure Falcom makes more overseas and L5 has cratered its big IPs and now its biggest, Ni No Kuni, sells most overseas, lmao at Mistwalker), says everything about how irrelevant the domestic market is to JP gaming companies relative to the West.

SEGA, SE, Capcom, NB have all gone to their investors and mentioned massive investment in the West. Hardly any of them mentioned that in Japan.

"JP publishers are not going to abandon PS or even go multiplat just because they are losing <5% sales."

Then you go on and list a lot of franchises that all have 10%+ in Japan. For a country with less than 2% of world population. Funny, how your own data contradicts your statements.

And that is with cherry-picked developers (no NIS, Falcom, Spike Chunsoft, Mistwalker, Level-5, Grasshopper) and with cherry-picked franchises (no Monster Hunter, no Dragon Quest). And yes, Monster Hunter and Dragon Quest are very important IPs for SE and Capcom. So even by leaving out all the software that has a bigger sales in Japan, you fail to support your own make-believe scenario.

I never said anything about abandonign PS, only shifting focus to PC, mobile and Switch. Which is already happening for a lot of these companies. I don't think Capcom will not release RE on PS, but I hardly believe it will be exclusive, if Sony isn't paying for that. And if you think japanese devs will ignore a market that makes more than 10% of their sales because they are such big PS fanboys that they are unwilling to look past that ecosystem, you lie to yourself.

BTW: Hyrule Warriors Age of Calamity sold more than Nioh, so that isn't KTs best selling game anymore. Also Nioh sold as far as I can see about 20% in Japan.

You're contradicting yourself constantly.

Where have you been these last few years? Practically every 3rd party franchise is multiplat now. The era of exclusives is over. 

Do we talk about East Asia or Asia? Two different things

If you check, you noticed Nintendo is dominant in Taiwan, South Korea(look of CeSA white papers), and growing mainland China. All East Asia territories. 

Asia is Nintendo’s fastest-growing market, with sales outside of Japan growing 152% this fiscal year

Sony console is third-party-driven, a lot of best-selling PS4 games don´t make difference at all when 17%-20% of sales only is first-party, Nintendo is 52%. So wrong again. 

The store has never to do with dominance, dominance is present in a determined market. If you lose all dominance in one major territory you have two problems: support for this territory and contamination for the satellites territories.

Sony was a third-party driven console, it´s a fact when lose exclusivity hurt more Sony than Nintendo. Falcom now will launch Nintendo, and other indies e mid-size publishers following this trend. 

The AAA production will be isolated if not go multiplatform. And if all go multiplatform Sony will lose domination, and will be more drastic on Japan. 

Your DS argument is broken in two ways firstly it's only a portable not a hybrid so online to it was a non issue it wasn't competing against the platforms that relied on it and secondly selling 30m units did have an effect look at the number of games released on DS compared to its actual competitor PSP this even goes further when we look at the successors of these two platforms that further backs my point as DS set the precedent and 3DS followed through and built on it both times beating out more advance tech this is what's going to happen again with the NS successor the way Sony have surrendered the region. The irony of the PSP and Vita is that you're arguing world wide publishers but it was only the Japanese ones who gave them any kind of chance the world wide publishers avoided them like the plague.

The Japanese aren't going to scale back their games they'll flat out build on the NS as the lead platform and port versions for other platforms if need be until the successor arrives, Falcom are an example of this who have recently announced they'll focus on NS more with their in house development, this was a company whose President in the past was notoriously anti-Nintendo mind you the reality of their situation is the push for the west is a venture for a few and like many developers they don't have such resources to be able to sacrifice the home market in doing so.