Most Japanese developers don't have the money to make games above Switch level to begin with. As such, it's probably a good thing for them that there's only one console left, because it eliminates the worries whether they chose the right console. Last generation hundreds of games were made for the Vita which pretty much killed the potential for overseas sales due to misguided brand loyalty. Now they have to make games for a globally successful console where their games aren't hopelessly outclassed in graphics by the few big publishers; that makes it easier for them to be competitive. Really, things got easier for them.

On the other hand, the developers who do have the money for high budget games have stopped giving much weight to domestic sales years ago, so nothing changes for them. The reason why Japan lost its importance is because in almost all cases it became unfeasible to make profitable games without banking on the overseas market right from the outset.

I really have a hard time thinking of any developers who are seriously negatively impacted by the PS decline, obviously aside from those who deliberately ignored market realities and made their games for PS only.

To be more clear I was focusing less on the developers there and more on the consumers. For example there will be Japanese console gamers who care a lot about stuff like graphics and fps so that development would be very bad for them.

Well that’s a pretty small part of the overall market in Japan and like Rol mentioned, the high budget games are and will remain on PS home consoles while the small-medium sized titles that were on PSV or PSV/PS4 will be on NSW or NSW/PS5.

But by the looks of it, Japanese gamers seem to be even less concerned about graphics and framerates than Japanese developers. PS5 software sales have been bad all year long.

Your previous post came across as questionable already, but your supposed clarification makes it only worse; there's just no way your first post can be read to be more about consumers than developers. It all looks like an attempt to make us feel bad for the PS decline in Japan because it's supposed to be a bad thing for the whole console market, but none of the data is going to back that up. Maybe you shouldn't have framed it as something that we probably can all agree on. Strange what went down here. Very uncharacteristic of you.

Better hardware benefits those games too though with stuff like reduced loading times and whatnot. I'm basically saying it would be bad for the Japanese console market to become something close to a monopoly.

I don’t really get your point, I just said those games can and likely will be multi platform.

To be more clear I was focusing less on the developers there and more on the consumers. For example there will be Japanese console gamers who care a lot about stuff like graphics and fps so that development would be very bad for them.

It's not like Playstation is going to disappear completely from the Japanese market, and it will still get the AAA stuff from Square and Capcom for instance, so it's still an option for gamers who care a lot about graphics and performance.

Those gamers are a small minority though; the average consumer doesn't care all that much about technical specs, look how many games with weak graphics/performance or low spec systems have found huge success.

Well, the original topic here is Nintendo vs. Sony software market share over the years, so the two generations before the PS1 don't contribute to the picture of how this software market share was distributed between Nintendo and Sony. During the four generations since the PS1, Sony was on top three times, so the DS+Wii generation does not qualify as the norm.

The DS+Wii generation marked a shift in third party support, but the troubling thing about the next shift (PSV+PS4) is that these Sony consoles' hardware total was lagging behind their Nintendo counterparts. A shift of that magnitude shouldn't have occured in the first place, especially when you take another look at the numbers earlier in the thread where the Vita was outpacing the 3DS in the number of retail releases for an extended period of time, particularly at the moment when the hardware battle had long been settled in favor of the 3DS.

The current shift in third party support is a real shift again and that's visible from the graph for software sales on PS home consoles (also found earlier in this thread). In that graph the PS3 averaged ~11m annually, the PS4 only ~9m annually, but with the caveat of growing digital sales, therefore mitigating this ~2m difference. The transition year between the PS3 and PS4 (2014) saw a soft drop whereas the transition year between the PS4 and PS5 is seeing a significant drop. That's a crucial difference we are witnessing and that's despite the PS4's and PS5's respective first year in hardware being very similar.

But 2021 is just the beginning, because software decisions are made years in advance and it takes time until they materialize in the marketplace. Given how various Japanese third parties have talked about the PS5 software situation, there doesn't seem to be the same faith in the PS ecosystem as a generation ago where the PSV and PS4 were bombarded with software irrespective of their slow hardware sales. It's not outrageous to expect annual PS5 retail software to be in the neighborhood of ~5m, so about half of what the PS4 accomplished. That is a significant decline before addressing the complete breakdown of software sales for portable PS hardware which had greatly helped PlayStation's overall software numbers for two generations.

Lastly, instead of merely counting the number of titles charting in the yearly top 500/1,000, it wouldn't be a bad idea to look at unit sales. I added 2017 as the midway point between the previously mentioned years 2014 and 2020.

2014: 26,690,929 for Nintendo, 16,067,673 for Sony
2017: 19,983,946 for Nintendo, 12,214,294 for Sony
2020: 24,836,808 for Nintendo, 8,018,518 for Sony

I think the key point here is that the large volume of PSV games didn't sell a lot of units individually, but they kept adding up to millions which then have transitioned slowly over to Nintendo and they aren't going to go back to Sony anytime soon. The above three sample years form a gradual decline for Sony that will see a more drastic drop once 2021 figures are in. Previously the decline was 1-2m units annually, but that decline is going to at least double in 2021.

I would have liked to add 2007 too, but nobody has done the work of tallying up the top 500 software. As a sidenote, the difference between a top 500 and a top 1,000 in units sales is in the ballpark of only 1-2m, so comparing 2007 to years of the 2010s wouldn't be too much of a problem.

Anyway, while there are ebbs and flows due to transitional years between generations (quickly looked up, 2016 for Nintendo was ~17m), this generation Sony isn't going to come anywere close to recovering to a ~15m level and that's not just due to the lack of portable PS hardware.

If I had the time, and more importantly, the determination to compile a full list of yearly unit sales totals, I'd do it. The follow-up step to getting the totals would be to include Microsoft as well and then calculate the software market share for each year for each console manufacturer.

I have no idea if this post is even coherent all the way through, because after I had started typing I began to look up more and more historic sales data. There's certainly more to be learned by putting more data together, although the big question mark is who is going to put in the effort to compile complete data before the 2010s. But either way, what's clear is that Sony has reached a historic low point of theirs, and it's damn low at that.

Edit: Btw here is an example of the Media create top 500 (2007) when Nintendo had a dominant console.

215 x NDS
112x PS2
58x Wii
57x PSP
33x PS3
19x X360
6x GBA

Was there a big 3rd party shift back then too?

I would have liked to add 2007 too, but nobody has done the work of tallying up the top 500 software. As a sidenote, the difference between a top 500 and a top 1,000 in units sales is in the ballpark of only 1-2m, so comparing 2007 to years of the 2010s wouldn't be too much of a problem.

Yours is a perplexing question.

I suppose you began fairly recently to follow the videogames sales data for the japanese market.

From Media Create Top 200 for 2004 one can infer that third-party software on PlayStation platforms sold several times more than third-party software on Nintendo platforms in that year.

In 2007 the situation was completely changed, with the majority of the annual third-party software which was sold on Nintendo platforms (Media Create Top 500), specifically the main contributor was the DS (Wii was never much supported by japanese publishers).

My suggestion would be to not just at look at the numbers in isolation instead to understand the context behind them.

It make no sense to compare the context in 2007 with the current one because the videogame world has completely changed in the past 15 years.

https://www.installbaseforum.com/forums/threads/the-reasons-and-consequences-of-the-decline-of-playstation-in-japan-update-new-guidelines.287/page-2#post-16596

I suggest as well to look at things logically to ascertain why PS games might not chart.

2022 is much more different than 2014 or 2007.

Media create 1000 from 2014 or Media create 500 from 2007 pretty much tells us the same thing.