The question is going to be how many of these PS5s are actually in Japan? Because I think it's not as much of a reach any longer to think a fairly sizable chunk of the PS5s sold this year have gone to China.

There's no reason for a Chinese buyer to buy a Chinese PS5 (or Switch or PS4 frankly, I guess XBox is just dead in Asia too but if Chinese game censorship was a concern for you, then the last console you'd want is the American one anyway, lol) if they can get a Japanese PS5 instead. 

Once the PS5s have been gathered they are loaded into vans and taken to another location for storage until they are shipped overseas.

📸Pic: @n19860117 5 Aug 2022 pic.twitter.com/ukkLMP84e9

— Jodie De Haarte ~ J-Cat (@jodiede) February 10, 2023

You can see Chinese buyers/Japanese exporters loading up on systems there to ship off to China. Suspect this is happening with the Switch also, the Zelda surge is also probably happening in China, but you wouldn't want to buy a Chinese Switch for that game. The thing is the demand for this is not going to be temporary because from what I gather gamers in China don't trust the government to not ban a bunch of games again, so you can't really invest in an official Chinese market PS5 or Switch or XBox without fear of being locked out of games at any time. 

Honestly I'm surprised people keep ignoring this dynamic, which was well established & reported way back in 2021, partially explains the PS5 software situation which has been very consistent across every piece of software, there is not a single outlier. The actual number of PS5's sitting in Japan is way less than raw numbers suggest. Honestly I think you can go as far as chopping the PS5's userbase in half... So people don't need to keep acting shocked & confused when the software mismatches the hardware.

Digital has a smaller but notable role to play

Honestly I'm surprised people keep ignoring this dynamic, which was well established & reported way back in 2021, partially explains the PS5 software situation which has been very consistent across every piece of software, there is not a single outlier. The actual number of PS5's sitting in Japan is way less than raw numbers suggest. Honestly I think you can go as far as chopping the PS5's userbase in half... So people don't need to keep acting shocked & confused when the software mismatches the hardware.

Digital has a smaller but notable role to play

In half? PS5 is at around 4m sold in Japan as of now. FF16 is at around 400k physical and if we include digital it's around 700-800k (Square did announce over 50% of FF16 sold were digital). So if there are only 2m PS5 in Japan then isn't the attach rate for FF16 seems ridiculous? That's around 40%. I saw a post here not long ago saying 30% of playstation users are subscribed to PS plus extra or premium and that's even higher in Japan.  Also higher digital rate and replaying free upgraded PS4 games on PS5

Didn't totw have a 50% digital rate in Japan? A few here posted it sold over 2m first week in Japan but only 1m physical.  You would think digital is much higher on PS5 . Why would digital be lower in Japan?