Japan is still the PS4's second largest market, the UK has it beat, but it launched there 5 months earlier and in a holiday season, launch aligned Japan is still doing comparable numbers, and it will probably be 2nd or 3rd LTD when the PS4 is discontinued, so I don't think it will be one of those "smaller markets", but a market that is slightly bigger than European markets.
It won't be anywhere near PS2, but a dead Japan is still bigger than most other console markets. Which actually shows how huge Japan was a decade or two ago.
I don't think breaking up the individual European markets is meaningful when the distinction is that Western countries overwhelmingly buy the same games.
The PS4 had shipped upwards of 25.3 million units back in July and the PS4 is at what, maybe 2 million shipped in Japan - which is a market that overwhelmingly only plays locally developed games?
If the market was buying the same games as the West this wouldn't be an issue, but the PS4 would also be doing much better.
Well that is also true. I just don't know if it was that reasonable to expect PS4 to somehow behave differently sales wise than PS3 when it's basically appealing to same audience. Well I guess VR could be the popular gimmick this gen but I emphasize the word ''could'' here.
In general I'm very bearish on VR being more than a notably niche interest.
The conversation more stems from being asked "Nirolak what would be a decent number for ps4 next week?"
I said a sustained 5-10K increase throughout the holiday season over the Summer 15-20K would be decent when looking, but when I stepped back and looked at the greater picture, it's kind of hard to contextualize the PS4 as decent at those levels given the situation.
There's pretty much no scenario I see in which the system could reasonably do anything for consoles because the audience is gone and no one is going to invest in reviving a market they have no real benefit in reviving.
I think you basically hit the nail on the head. There isn't a reasonable context in which we can expect the PS4 to be a good performer without a whole lot of conditional statements.
Well, you could argue that this is the first generation without a "non-traditional" platform.
Last-gen we had Wii and Nintendo DS.
The generation prior, the PlayStation 2 was a cheap DVD player and a desirable platform to a brand new type of gamer.
And before that, the PlayStation and N64 introduced 3d games to consoles after more than a decade of 2d games.
Perhaps a "non-traditional" approach is what the industry needs. That, and a better answer to smartphones in the portable sector.
That's the issue though. The non-traditional platform *is* smartphones. We've moved to the point where the new and interesting platform that pushed strong growth for the industry (and Japan's gaming industry is making significantly more money than ever) left the sphere of dedicated devices.