Does Japan really care about the PS4?

[Zeus]

The launch didn't cause as much of a frenzy over there

http://www.edge-online.com/news/ps4-lau ... yers-care/

Basically, you could easily still get one a couple days later and even the launch event had tickets available after it started.

[Blotus]

You can't play it on the train / no Monster Hunter or child-touching simulators = no.

[Eric]

You can't play it on the train / no Monster Hunter or child-touching simulators = no.

Terrible.

But yeah, home console market seems dead in Japan.

Mobile rules, and the handheld market is shrinking.

I think Sony was banking on remote play for vita there more then any other territory, but it's still a hard price to swallow to buy both the PS4/Vita and then the proprietary memory cards for the Vita. Although if FFXV doesn't suck it might appeal to some people to play it on their Vitas on the train while streaming it from home lol, also if Sony can get the next Dragon Quest game on the PS4 instead of the 3DS.

Sony also should have money hatted to get Monster Hunter, it could have revitalized the Vita there.

[kali o.]

Not surprising, but I am jealous of the Japanese launch line up.

[Eric]

Which ones specifically Kali? I only really know about Yakuza/Dynasty Warriors 8.

[Eric]

Here's another article about the Japanese industry.

http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2 ... ec8108446c

The PlayStation 4 launched in Japan on Saturday, three months after its arrival in the US and Europe. To veteran industry watchers, the delay speaks volumes about the decline of the Japanese games industry

The queues seemed to stretch forever along the crowded streets of Akihabara, Tokyo’s famed Electronic Town. Outside the biggest stores, scuffles broke out as gamers fought for favourable positions – the police were called in. It was chaos. This was March 2000, the launch of the PlayStation 2 console – the most successful games machine ever produced. The rest of the world would have to wait months for this, but back then the domestic market was the most important to Sony, as it had been to all major console manufacturers for twenty years. Japan was the epicentre of gaming; it had the console makers, the best developers and the biggest games. But over the course of the following decade things changed.

February 22, 2014. The PlayStation 4 is being launched in Japan three months after the machine’s high profile arrival in North America. There have been queues, of course, but no riot police this time, and no one is watching the sales figures for a hint of how this console may perform – it has already sold five million units elsewhere in the world. There are a couple of Japanese launch titles – gangster adventure Yakuza: Ishin and fantasy strategy sim Dynasty Warriors 8: Xtreme Legends the key examples – but, apart from a new beta demo for Final Fantasy 14: A Realm Reborn there is nothing huge. Talking about the delay, Shuhei Yoshida, president of Sony Worldwide Studios, has said that the Japanese development industry wasn’t quite ready to support the machine, but this isn’t the whole story. It papers over something more profound. The country hasn’t been ready for years.

In 2002, Japan accounted for 50% of the global video game market. By 2010, it was at 10%. If you go back to the era of PlayStation 1 and 2, you will see it was dominated by Japanese giants like Nintendo, Sony, Capcom, Konami and Namco. The biggest games were arcade conversions – the likes of Tekken, Ridge Racer and Street Fighter – but the biggest console originals came from Japanese studios too: Super Mario, Resident Evil, Final Fantasy, Metal Gear Solid... These were the games everyone was excited by. The top ten best selling games of the nineties were all developed in Japan.

[kali o.]

Which ones specifically Kali? I only really know about Yakuza/Dynasty Warriors 8.

Yakuza, sure. I thought they got Nobunaga's Ambition too.

[Eric]

Which ones specifically Kali? I only really know about Yakuza/Dynasty Warriors 8.

Yakuza, sure. I thought they got Nobunaga's Ambition too.

Whoa? Like Strategy Nobunaga's Ambition? x_x

I miss Koei's strategy games.

[Julius Seeker]

Eric, I don't buy your article at all.

For starters. It claims Japan accounted for 50% of the videogame market in 2002. This figure is grossly incorrect. 2002 marked the end of the PSX era: approximately 25 million PSXs and N64s sold in Japan, out of 136m sold worldwide - this is 18%, not 50%.

[Don]

Nobunaga's Ambition 14 came out recently, but I thought it was for the PC.

[SineSwiper]

For starters. It claims Japan accounted for 50% of the videogame market in 2002. This figure is grossly incorrect. 2002 marked the end of the PSX era: approximately 25 million PSXs and N64s sold in Japan, out of 136m sold worldwide - this is 18%, not 50%.

Maybe they aren't talking about just the consoles? Maybe they included PC games? They just said "videogame market".

[Eric]

Eric, I don't buy your article at all.

For starters. It claims Japan accounted for 50% of the videogame market in 2002. This figure is grossly incorrect. 2002 marked the end of the PSX era: approximately 25 million PSXs and N64s sold in Japan, out of 136m sold worldwide - this is 18%, not 50%.

I could be mistaken, but I think the article was referring to games developed in Japan and sold world-wide, which would be pretty accurate, if not an outright understatement, Japanese games used to dominate the market in all territories. Today, however more games are made in the West and sell better and control the market then the Japanese counterparts, this is taking into account game series that have been outsourced to western development groups that were traditionally made in-house by Japanese companies(Retro making Metroid and Donkey Kong, and Ninja Theory making DMC for instance).

[Julius Seeker]

If it were about games sales. that 10% number for 2010 would be incorrect:
2010 had 445 million software sales on consoles according to VG Chartz. If you take Nintendo's top 5 selling Wii games alone for that year - Wii Sports (15m), Wii Sports Resort (11m), Wii Fit Plus (8m) Mario Galaxy 2 (6m), New Super Mario World (11m) - you get 51 million sales, which is already more than 10%. This doesn't even factor in DS and PSP sales which would add 165 million game sales, very heavily dominated by Japanese developers.

http://www.vgchartz.com/yearly/2010/Global/

So I still wouldn't buy that article =P

They probably just made everything up.

[Eric]

Nah you were right originally, it was about Japan's buying of video games, although I'm not sure where 50% and 10% came from, unless they're saying mobile doesn't count in 2010, he quoted this wiki, which quoted bbc news back in Nov 2010(before Christmas sales!)

http://vgsales.wikia.com/wiki/Video_games_in_Japan
http://vgsales.wikia.com/wiki/Video_game_industry
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/programmes/c ... 159905.stm

2002 Japan
$12.13 billion
$7 billion (arcade market)
$5.03 billion (retail market)
$100 million (mobile market)

2002 Industry
$31 billion

2010 Japan
$13.7 billion
$6.3 billion (arcade)
$3.6 billion (retail software)
$3.8 billion (mobile)

2012 Industry
$63 billion

[Julius Seeker]

Launch day sales were 322K, that is about 3.6 times higher than the PS3 launch of only 88K.

http://www.thesixthaxis.com/2014/02/25/ ... till-king/

[Julius Seeker]

It's down to 30K on week 3. That was a tremendously steep drop.

[Eric]

There's nothing available for it to actually sell the thing right now. With the exception of Sony's own games (which really aren't appealing to the market), it's just filled with a bunch of games that you can get on the PS3. Until that changes the sales aren't going to look good.

Japan is going to be on last gen for quite some time.

[bovine]

I found the first party games to be pretty poor. The system is going through some major doldrums right now, but Infamous is right around the corner.

It had some neat downloadable games that were all free on PS+ (Resogun, Don't Starve, Outlast, and some old PS3 dual stick zombie shooter that I cannot remember the name of), but no real big hits that draw you back to keep playing them.

[Zeus]

Dead Nation: Apocalypse Edition. It was basically put up there so Sony had something to give for the March freebie since there's so little content