Japanese PlayStation 4 Sales Perform Slower than WiiU

It came as a surprise to everyone when Sony decided to release the PlayStation 4 in Japan a full 3 months after the USA and Europe. For the first time, a Japanese console did not launch in Japan first. The move seems to have been smartly calculated by Sony however, rather than having stock sitting in Japanese shelves at launch... the entire inventory was diverted to the markets where it was guaranteed to sell. Other regions saw record setting sales of the console, with the USA racking up 1 million units in the first 24 hours. 

To put things into perspective, PlayStation 4 sold 309,154 units in the first week, followed by 65,685, followed by 35,294. When the WiiU launched a year ago it was 308,142 the first week, followed by 126,916, and 133,843 by week three.

So why are PlayStation 4 sales so weak and what is selling?

Lack of games is an obvious issue... with Knack receiving poor review scores and Sega's new Yakuza title being available on both PS3 and PS4. To be fair, our launch lineup wasn't any more impressive with lots of multi-platform titles alongside Killzone: Shadow Fall and Knack.

What has been selling are portable titles. The top selling game last week was Soul Sacrifice: Delta and the PS Vita was only 1,000 units behind the PS4 in hardware sales. Sales charts are dominated by 3DS titles like Yokai Watch and Dragon Quest Monsters.


Does this mean the PlayStation 4 is doomed in Japan?

Portable devices have been dominating consoles in Japan for quite some time now. The PS3 had a terrible Japanese launch... only about 1/3 of what the PS4 has sold. On the other hand, PS2 sold twice as much at launch compared to the PS4. Despite having a slow start, the PS3 has done just fine... and still has solid titles like Persona 5 on the way. Also keep in mind the WiiU sales were during a December holiday, in comparison to PS4's February release.

The video game hardware business is hard to predict... nobody saw the Nintendo Wii becoming a bonafide cultural phenomenon, or the Xbox One resorting to a price drop just months after launch. However, Japanese developers are going to focus primarily on systems that have a large Japanese install base... which unfortunately means less Japanese games on consoles.  

Source- Gematsu