Since the PS5 launch, Third Parties have sold well over
5 million on the Switch in Japan; meanwhile the best selling third party game on the PS4/PS5 is
Cyberpunk 2077 and it managed just over
100K. It's a similar situation in other Asian markets which are always overlooked when discussing sales, we already know that the Top 5 in Taiwan/South Korea in the past 12 months have barely featured PS4 games.
The situation in the West is more competitive but in Japan and East Asia, it does seem that Switch software sales are magnitudes greater than the PlayStation ecosystem.
In 2021 the best selling PS4/PS5 game according to Famitsu in Japan is
Little Nightmares 2 with around
25K sales
As the majority of both AA & AAA Japanese third party titles make 80% of their sales in Japan & Asia.. the market conditions there are certainly shaping future decisions. You cannot overlook the latest news like
Everybody's Golf going mobile,
Type-Moon launching a
Tsukihime Remake as a multiplat; while
Konami opts for
Baseball Spirits to be an exclusive on the Switch after historically doing well on the PS3/PS4/PSV,
Disgaea 6 being exclusive to the Switch outside of Japan, recent VN games like
The Quintessential Quintuplets selling x2/x3 on the Switch compared to the PS4 etc.
These types of things show the trend, that will accelerate, Nintendo was only able to make the Switch so huge in Japan thanks to it's own efforts - while Sony's 1st Party studios have basically nothing to offer to move the needle
Marketing and retail space is key for publishers in their home country, we all see the pictures that
silpheed-mcd
posts in these threads; every single video game store is basically a huge Nintendo promotion with PlayStation getting less and less space.. this has long term implications about how difficult it would be for Sony to re-establish its previous position and maintain relationships with their partners.
In the past few months several high profile people from Sony Japan were let go, with these people Sony is also losing their relationships within the local market. Everything is adding towards a very drastic decline in the region, that I've been outlining since last summer.
I'm not saying this to provoke anyone in this thread, it's just the current market reality in Japan and likely South Korea & Taiwan. This doesn't diminish the success PS5 currently has in the rest of the World , but that success will be less aligned with the majority of future Japanese third party games. I understand Sony's position because they are in far greater competition by Microsoft in the West and they've got to protect their lucrative AAA market; where microtransactions and subscriptions are key parts of their growth strategy. But in Japan the market is different,
FIFA never managed more than
500K,
GTAV isn't among the Top 20 best selling games of all time,
COD isn't doing millions.
Sony does have a few other successful ways to remain relevant in Japan, but their video game hardware philosophy at the moment is not one of them. They are heavily investing in Anime and
Fate is their most relevant IP in Japan, generating billions via gatcha and merchandise. The current hardware & software philosophy simply seems to clash with what Japan finds popular; as we can see in the West the PS5 launch games are having great legs but in Japan that's not the case; the first major PS5 title
Resident Evil:Village is also on the PS4.. so from a PS5 software perspective we might be half an year into the life of the system without a game surpassing
100K.