Sony has traditionally been good in locking down Japanese third parties to Playstation and get them to snub Nintendo, but it could be the case that the Switch era has finally made relations between Nintendo and Japanese publishers so good that the old Sony tactic can't be done this time around.

Provided Nintendo don't screw it up, Switch 2 should be primed to dominate Japan, as third parties will finally have a system that's powerful enough to handle the vast majority of their titles, but which Japanese gamers actually care about.

Big Japanese games are having to rely on the West for much of their sales at present because of PS/Xbox's poor local performance, while Switch's low power spec rules out most of their more demanding games. Remove that roadblock, and the Japanese software market should see a huge boost.

NSW2 in Japan could be very massive…potentially even more massive than NSW. (1) Nintendo isn’t coming off their deepest state of cultural irrelevancy as they were in early-2017, they’ve got a massive leg up with NSW2 compared to NSW right out the gate. (2) Mainline entries of all these very popular Japanese titles like Final Fantasy, Persona, Metaphor (i.e. JRPGs), Monster Hunter, etc., will finally arrive on Nintendo systems with minimal compromises. (3) Pokémon, Animal Crossing, Splatoon will be running on what will likely be a more powerful version of a PS4 Pro (JP will go nuts over this lol). (4) PS5 costs too much for the Japanese consumer, and is only getting more expensive it seems.

Of course…NSW2 will likely not experience a similar period of mania as seen with NSW during the COVID years, so it certainly isn’t a guarantee. Matter of fact, I question whether NSW2 will even match NSW sales figures…but this is speculation on a system we know literally nothing about lol.

I think Switch 2 will have some advantages over Switch 1 in Japan, like more of the big Japanese third party games coming out on the system, but it also have a major disadvantage in that it will probably be much more expensive to buy than Switch 1. I wonder what strategies Nintendo will follow in Japan to not see a sales collapse from the big increase in price due to the weak yen.

King Switch 2 is coming to destroy King Switch 1

I would argue that Japanese 3rd party's don't need to chase playstation and Xbox, and instead make games that can run on the switch anyway

The way I see it is, Nintendo games aren't "small" games like Zelda, xenoblade and the Witcher shows that big games work, and do well on the system, there is no real reason final fantasy should be skipping Nintendo

If Devs and publishers weren't forced to make games these technical showcases then having slightly lowered sales wouldn't sting as much; if rebirth had the same budget as xenoblade chronicles 3, and released on switch, you would still get a very good game that would have had more sales since I believe the people who would have skipped it for being "too last gen" would be massively outweighed by the people who would have bought it on switch

Nintendo switch having such a massive piracy problem shows that people want the games regardless, there is only so much 4k upscaling can do, the games need to look and be good at a fundamental level to see interest, and with the amount of complaining people do when Nintendo gets games, 3rd party or otherwise show the interest

Sony has been snuffing the Japanese for years and now games are not only releasing on switch but are coming out first, like monster hunter stories, smt5 ect, but some games are skipping playstation, like the last defence 100 line game (forgot it's actual name) and playstation customers are trying to blame everything but Sony for that