Let’s face it, Japan doesn’t really care about consoles anymore.
With the release of the Xbox One’s first week of sales in Japan, I was quick to reach for sales numbers for the Playstation 4, Wii U, 3DS, and even Playstation Vita to put those numbers into context. Knowing that Japan wasn’t necessarily the Xbox capital, I still considered the country synonymous with console gaming at large. A quick glance at the numbers betrays the outdatedness of that notion.
Console(r)s of the lonely
No one really expected Microsoft’s Xbox One to sell like crazy in Japan. When I saw the paltry 23,562 units Famitsu reported after its first week, I was actually a bit surprised the number was that high. Were there that many expats wanting to play Titanfall?
It’s not exactly Black Friday.
Five-digit sales were probably welcome news for the Xbox Japan brand manager, who saw just 146 units the Xbox 360 moved during a week last month. That number isn’t a typo. You could literally count them yourself and not feel the least bit overwhelmed. The crazy thing is the Xbox 360 fared much better during its own launch than the Xbox One has. So the only explanation is that Japanese developers have run American hardware out of the country once and for all, right?
While as a percentage, the Xbox 360-Xbox One transition looks ugliest, it’s actually Nintendo and Sony that have failed to, as the suits might say, convert “next-gen” users in Japan in absolute numbers—by a huge margin.
Playstation for…?
Sony’s run worldwide with the Playstation 4 is impressive. Moving over 10 million units in less than a year, with all these newfangled smartphones supposedly eating into its user base is amazing. I still have trouble believing that actually happened. But equally surprising is how sobering the decreased sales in Sony’s home country have become.
To date, the Playstation 4 has sold 670,000 units in Japan. When compared to the Playstation 2’s launch weekend sales of 630,552 , you can surmise Japanese people are no longer living in their console heyday. The 3DS and even struggling Wii U have outpaced the PS4 in Japan, as has the Playstation Vita, which is well behind its predecessor the Playstation Portable (PSP).
But Sony at least can be thankful it’s doing something right in other territories, and hope that sales pick up in the same way they did for the Playstation 3 over its lifetime. Nintendo hasn’t been so lucky.
Wii used to be fans
No rational person expected the Wii U to be as successful as the Wii. My mom, for example, is never going to be into another gaming console in her life. And that’s okay. The moment I saw that well-meaning Nintendo consumers half her age couldn’t even discern that the Wii U was a new console, however, I knew that the Nintendo’s system was in trouble.
“This, it’s actually the game pad. You’ll need a Wii U to play it. No, you need a Wii U”
Its numbers in Japan have rebounded somewhat, but it would take the struggling system a few lifetimes to repeat the success of its forebear. To quote the lyricist and philosopher Eminem, “you only got one shot, do not miss your chance to blow, ‘cause opportunity knocks once in a lifetime.” I fear that opportunity may have already knocked for Wii-named hardware. With Nintendo’s new console announcement an iteration of the 3DS, you can see that even Mario and company are prioritizing gaming on the go.
I wanna hold your hand…held
If there’s one bright spot for core gaming in Japan, it’s that the handheld market seems to be fading much less quickly. The 3DS is actually selling at a faster rate than its immensely successful predecessor, but somehow it seems like less of a phenomenon than the DS.
A slight update for Nintendo’s current cash cow.
We can attribute this to several factors. First, barely surpassing your predecessor isn’t exactly going to make people stand up and take notice in any meaningful way. Second, I wager that most 3DS owners still only take it out when they purposefully want to play games, and rely on their smartphone to kill smaller increments of time. Whereas I used to play my DS on subway rides, I save it more for longer trips these days, and wouldn’t even consider taking it out at the bank when I can play Swing Copters on my phone or browse the internet. I bet your habits are similar.
Upward mobile-ity
All is not lost, it seems that the spirit of gaming has been reincarnated, albeit in a more subtle form. Japan is absolutely mad for mobile gaming, as we’ve reported before, and the aforementioned resilience of the handheld systems suggests that there has been a subtle shift in the way the average person look at games in Japan. The population certainly isn’t getting any younger—or even larger—in the archipelago.
(See: Games account for nearly 90% of all mobile app revenue in Japan)
It leads me to believe that coverage of the Japanese industry needs to undergo its own transition. Should we hold all Japanese developers to a standard set in a bygone age when there was more focus on AAA console development? Titles like the Yakuza series seem more like outliers than the norm, and increasingly Japan’s best video game minds are focused on handheld and mobile gaming. If that’s the case, we can stop hoping Resident Evil 7 will be as good as Resident Evil 4.
How have your gaming habits changed in the last five or ten years?
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The post Let’s face it, Japan doesn’t really care about consoles anymore. appeared first on Games in Asia.
The post Let’s face it, Japan doesn’t really care about consoles anymore. appeared first on Games in Asia.
