For the last 20 years, the Japanese home console market has been dominated by Nintendo and Sony. Microsoft tried to make an impact during the Xbox 360 era with exclusive games like Lost Odyssey, Blue Dragon and Tales of Vesperia (timed exclusive) but to no real success, which isn’t taking away from their quality. Then there was the Xbox One which had practically no presence in Japan.

Is Sony’s grip on Japan loosening?

So here we stand 15 months into the new generation of consoles, but it’s the past week that sparked an interesting thought in my head; is the market in Japan for home consoles changing?

First let’s take the numbers, published by Famitsu; for the week of 7th February 2022 – 13th February 2022

Console sales charts
(credit to Sal Romano from Gematsu):

As you can see, as expected, Nintendo and their Switch family of consoles still sit on the throne of Japan. You can also see that the lifetime sales of the PS5 still lead the race over the Xbox Series. However, it’s the total sales between the Xbox Series X|S and both PS5 consoles which are interesting. For the that week, Sony sold 6,418 PlayStation 5 and PlayStation 5 Digital. Xbox Series X|S sold 5,955 consoles. Sony are still leading week by week but that’s not that much of a gap. Even more interesting is that the Series S outsold both the Series X and PS5 Digital.

Why is the Xbox Series S doing so well?

So what’s causing this then? Is it availability? The small size of the Series S? The function of Xbox Cloud Gaming with Game Pass Ultimate? Sony’s apparent desire to concentrate more on Western audiences? It’s probably a bit of each. And with speculation of Microsoft wanting to acquire more Japanese studio(s) /publisher(s), who knows how their presence can grow?

For now it’s business as usual, Nintendo rule and Sony are the ones in peoples homes in Japan but keep a close eye on this, cause there does feel like a shift might be happening.