Japan Sales Charts: PS5 Can't Quite Topple 100k in Final Weeks of Year

" It’ll be interesting to see if Sony can do anything to improve its software sales in 2024"

scary times ahead.

I’m not sure Sony care too much. They’ve decimated whole genres of Japanese games due to their censorship policies these last 5 1/2 years, just for PR purposes, shut down Japan Studio, and have shown zero interest in a portable handheld device so popular over there 🤷‍♂️

Those Xbox sales are for two weeks? 😬

Once games like Dragons Dogma 2, Persona 3 Reloaded, Rise of the Ronin, New Yakuza games, FF7 ReBirth, new Monster Hunter and Dragons Dogma 2 release the PS5 sales will shoot up again, but for their first party game they don't usually sell well in Japan anyway apart from Ghost of Tsushima. I think the PS5 is still doing well over there, after 3 years it's sold nearly two thirds of the total PS4 sales.

@thefourfoldroot1 I agree with your last two points on Japan Studio and a dedicated handheld but what genre have they exactly decimated? Only games they have clamped down on are the ones with minigames that allow you to touch the female characters which were games that struggled to sell 100k in Japan and even less in the west.

More worrying is the lack of any PS5 games in the top 10 software sales besides the game bundled with a lot of PS5s. Theres more large scale Japanese appealing games not on switch coming this year (Granblue, Persona 3, Rise of the Ronin, FF7Rebirth, Like a Dragon Infinite Wealth, Tekken 8, Stellar Blade), but idk if it’ll be able to crack the Nintendo stronghold. Sony really needs to invest in smaller games. Idk if the reports of Sony not considering $100 million dollar games AAA are true, but if that’s what they consider mid budget then they’re completely out of touch with a decent portion of the gaming audience.

Switch sales still lead (software and hardware). No rush for a successor.

@sd7232 I mean that’s only in Japan. Worldwide, system sales are on a decline. It’s been 7 years since the Switch launched, it’s appropriate timing for a successor. Not to mention next year’s lineups gives all the implications of a successor being on the way like the last years of the Wii and 3ds before their successors came out (Smaller scope remakes and remasters and smaller eshop sized games).

@Deoxyr1bose I am in US and will admit much bias as I got my Switch only 14 months ago and in no rush for the next one as have a huge backlog of games for it…..same with PS5 & Xbox 🤷‍♂️.

PS4 still selling about as many units and the XSS and XSX put together! Ouch...

The Switch is in need of a replacement, simply to keep 3rd party titles heading to a Nintendo system as the ageing mobile tech just isn't enough any more. What's the point of a portable system when it has to rely on an online element to crunch the numbers fast enough?

Incredible how the Switch across its different version sold DOUBLE the amount than PS5.

Honestly, I just don't get how popular those handhelds are and how SONY's BEST response is one streaming device WITHOUT any capability of storing (simpler) games. Somehow there ought to be a handheld model capable of running PS5-games in a worse version offline which could then synchronize with the overall system when entering a trusted WIFI-network. I wonder if there will be something like this in the future.

Japans just weird. All games there have like 2-3 switches and just keep buying more of theml

Thing to remember about software sales is that it is physical copies. Kids always buy/get bought physical copies here in Japan. PlayStation is popular with an older demographic (high school upwards) and much more likely to buy digital.