• Hey, guest user. Hope you're enjoying NeoGAF! Have you considered registering for an account? Come join us and add your take to the daily discourse.

Famitsu Sales: 6/20/22 – 6/26/22: FE Warriors: 3 Hopes opens at 98k

Is Japan gaming overall not caught up in 4K/60FPS/HDR graphics race? I mean the Switch success would imply that and the mobile gaming would also support that. From an outsider seems like a very different type of gaming. I imagine lower expensive games do fairly well, like recent Square switch RPGS etc. Is the Microsoft gamepass message reaching the audience there? is it something Japanese games care about?. Once again the Switch dominance makes it very difficult to read, unless it's just the perfect mobile gaming middle ground or something. Is it the hand held nature of the Switch?, because if so, Microsoft needs to make game pass Steam Deck or Series S (Series P-portable) and strike.
It's likely a combination of a lot of what you bring up. The Japanese market for many years now has continually shifted to the portable market, to the point where a fixed, box console is nearly a niche product over there. But also, Microsoft has been on a bent lately to reach agreements with Japanese publishers to port their catalogue to Xbox, in many cases for the first time ever. So where once Sony had that space on lockdown, they are receding and Xbox is chipping away at what little there remains in Japan of the non-Switch market.
 

Woopah

Member
Is Japan gaming overall not caught up in 4K/60FPS/HDR graphics race? I mean the Switch success would imply that and the mobile gaming would also support that. From an outsider seems like a very different type of gaming. I imagine lower expensive games do fairly well, like recent Square switch RPGS etc. Is the Microsoft gamepass message reaching the audience there? is it something Japanese games care about?. Once again the Switch dominance makes it very difficult to read, unless it's just the perfect mobile gaming middle ground or something. Is it the hand held nature of the Switch?, because if so, Microsoft needs to make game pass Steam Deck or Series S (Series P-portable) and strike.
It's likely a combination of a lot of what you bring up. The Japanese market for many years now has continually shifted to the portable market, to the point where a fixed, box console is nearly a niche product over there. But also, Microsoft has been on a bent lately to reach agreements with Japanese publishers to port their catalogue to Xbox, in many cases for the first time ever. So where once Sony had that space on lockdown, they are receding and Xbox is chipping away at what little there remains in Japan of the non-Switch market.
Its all about appealing software. In Japan Nintendo has been able to create or grow franchises that appeal to the Japanese market fairly consistently over the past 15 years, in a way that third parties have not. A lot of the third party franchise that were big on PS1/PS2 have declined significantly since then. There are some exceptions of course (Dragon Quest is still big, Monster Hunter has grown a lot, and Level 5 had many successes before they crashed and burned.) But the end result is that Nintendo's market power in Japan is now higher than all the other publishers combined, so its fairly difficult for a non-Nintendo platform to succeed.

Even in the West the 4K/60FPS/HDR graphics race means very very little, its all about which platform has popular franchises. Now Nintendo is still very strong in the West, but their market dominance is not as high as in East Asia because there are Western parties like EA and Ubisoft who can regularly put out massive games.
 
Top Bottom