It’s no secret that there has been a huge shift away from traditional console gaming in Japan. Revenue generated by Mobile games now has a majority share in the Video games market whilst revenue generated by traditional console game sales have dropped considerably. In order to boost sales of next generation systems we saw both Sony and Microsoft drop the price of the consoles by ¥5.000 on October 1st and today, sales tracker “Media Create” released their latest numbers which show the immediate effect of the price drop.
With the price cut in full effect this week the Xbox One only managed to sell through 203 units compared to the 232 units that were sold through last week. It really goes to show that the Xbox brand isn’t appealing to consumers in Japan the same way the 360 did last gen. With the 360 there were a few games aimed at consumers in Japan but with the Xbox One there haven’t been any significant releases that are exclusive to the console and that have appeal to the audience there.
The Xbox One has been a failure from day 1 in Japan and despite being on sale for more than a year the total number of units sold to date is just under 60,000. To put that into perspective, the Xbox 360 was the worst selling console in Japan last gen with 1.6 million units sold compared to 10 million PS3’s and 12 million Wii’s. In fact the Xbox 360 sold more than 60,000 units during its opening weekend in Japan so that really shows you how the Xbox user base has shrunk in Japan.
The PlayStation 4 on the other hand has been struggling to exceed 20,000 units on a weekly basis. Whilst that is considerably better than the Xbox One and marginally better than the Wii U it still shows that the console market isn’t as big as it once was back when the Wii and PS3 were out in Japan. The ¥5,000 price cut for the PS4 allowed sales to jump up to 46,177 unit sales for the week which makes it one of the best selling weeks this year for the PS4. It’s expected that the PS4 will continue to sell well through the rest of the year thanks to the new price and new software releases.
The Wii U still leads as the best selling console in Japan but the PlayStation 4 is tracking ahead of the Wii U in weekly sales and therefore should become the leader eventually. The Wii U did have a year head start though so I doubt we’ll see them drop into second until sometime in 2016.
