Wrong! This also got a PS5 version. Yep, PS5 version, no PS4 version. Even though it could easily run on it. The result? The PS5 version launched outside of the Top 30! Meaning it sold less than 1.6k!
PS5 software sales in Japan continue to be abysmal! That’s why we still see RE4 PS4 and Like a Dragon 8 on PS4 in 2024!
Elden Ring has become the fastest selling Japanese game not made by Nintendo. Probably gonna become the best selling Japanese 3rd party game of all time.
Star Ocean The Divine Force managed to get #14 charted. With the news pre-release that tri-Ace may be facing a financial crisis, hopefully this game is selling well enough to help them recover
Persona 5 selling as much as it has despite being full price ON gamepass AND -5 year old game is insane. Switch sales probably contributed a lot but still
[PS5] Tactics Ogre: Reborn – 7,805 / NEW
Hardware Sales
Switch – 97.542 (26.750.198)
PlayStation 5 – 28.716 (2.109.269)
Xbox Series X|S – 748 (379.532)
PlayStation 4 – 138 (9.395.605)
3DS – 32 (24.596.902)
Lots of new games to chew on this week. Tactics Ogre is looking like a pretty good W for Square Enix. It outsold Valkyrie Elysium, Star Ocean, and Harvestella, and isn’t even a new game. Xbox needed this game… Not that dumb Diofield game…
GoW opens to about 40k sales. Again I don’t call this “terrible”, but it clearly shows the cinematic third person genre isn’t really that big in this region.
Sonic doesn’t seem to have sold the best IMO, I don’t think Japan really cared about Sonic that much ever since Sega console ceased to be. According to others these are actually decently good numbers for Sonic in Japan though
For the Xbox number, there was:
XBS X: 261
XBS S: 487
With how “low” they’ve been lately people are starting to figure that Famitsu course corrected their overcounting and now we’re seeing more accurate numbers. Famitsu also overtracked Switch sales by about 500k, but there is a lot more negligible because the number is so high anyway, so their Xbox overtracking is a lot more wild.
Well if Xbox numbers are indeed 2 times smaller than we expected then…damn. We can safely cross ooff Series consoles in Japan and consider them nonexistent. With those numbers it is basically XBO+
That’s a reason I’ve been posting about how PC gaming is sharply increasing in Japan and how that could be MS’s method of growing the Xbox ecosystem there.
There’s still problems that MS needs to sort out too:
Bad or even nonexistent JP localizations are still prevalent
Xbox presence in the region still sucks. At TGS there was no Xbox booth or anything. Meanwhile Valve came in with their first year of TGS and had a huge Steam Deck booth, not to mention Xbox sections in stores are still either nonexistent or a tiny corner
Needs exclusive content JP audiences will enjoy. When Phil is interviewed in Japan, basically these 2 questions always pop up “Are you reviving Scalebound?” and “Will you ever do anything with Blue Dragon and Lost Odyssey again?”
Major players still missing from the platform. Like Square Enix or not, look how successful Tactics Ogre is for such a niche remaster, and it’s exclusively not on Xbox
It’s also just flat out hard to penetrate a market.
If PS isn’t doing to hot, what makes people think Xbox would. It’s going to be a slow burn and it’ll probably never pop off in Japan but they still can’t give up. Phil and the team probably know this.
Japanese users will buying PC, not Xbox.
No reason to choose Xbox in Japan, because Japanese games missing and many Game Pass titles that are not support Japanese languages.
