Inside China's 'hidden' game console market: PS5 (legal+grey) >1.4M, 50-60% of Wo Long, Kuro no Kiseki estimated players from Hong Kong

[enpleinjour]

In-depth: inside China's 'hidden' game console market

Also: why can't you discover old games? And lots of news...

newsletter.gamediscover.co

As for the kind of games Chinese PlayStation gamers play? Niko's survey of actual players reveals: "Console exclusive games, predominantly first party titles, are most popular on PlayStation. Titles in the God of War, The Last of Us and Gran Turismo franchise were most played over the past 3 months."

However, there's a lot of interest in the F2P console 'big guys' too, including at least one domestically-created game: "Free to play titles such as Genshin Impact, Destiny 2 and Apex Legends are popular on PlayStation, with the first two being the most played titles by average weekly hours."

We last got official PS5 numbers from Sony as of Mar 2022 EoY Fiscal year which was 670K. So one can say the total PS5 grey market is <700K in China.

A prevalent theory I see often mentioned here is there being a substantial amount of PS5's imported from Japan by Chinese users, as a way to explain the increasingly good hardware sales and lackluster physical software sales in JP. I've often disagreed with how large of an impact that would have, F2P, digital sales are more important factors to look at from my point.

Currently there are 3.85M PS5's. Bear in mind not all grey market PS5's are going to be from Japan.

• Assuming 500K are from Japan thats around 13% of current PS5 JP install base. IMO thats the upper limit.

Its great to see at least some market data appear.

 

[Astrogamer]

That's not the upper limit. There has been 1.3 million sold in Japan this year. The end of 2022 total was 2.5 million. The 500k would be of that total so it would be 20%. If that ratio was maintained, it would a grey market total of 760k. It's also not considering the grey market out of China (if that 670k includes Hong Kong). While it's not going to be as big as Japan's exports, the Hong Kong PS5 are going to exported to some degree to the rest of Asia (sans Korea and Japan) and a lesser degree to Latin America and Africa. A decent expectation of that would be around 50k being exported out.

 

[MegaXZero]

A prevalent theory I see often mentioned here is there being a substantial amount of PS5's imported from Japan by Chinese users, as a way to explain the increasingly good hardware sales and lackluster physical software sales in JP. I've often disagreed with how large of an impact that would have, F2P, digital sales are more important factors to look at from my point.

The theory is scalping and exporting out of Japan, not just to China. And the software sales in Japan would just be disastrous without a substantial amount of consoles leaving Japan. 2022 PS5 digital was quite low given that EDF finished at #2. There would be just no hope for PS software recovery if the core audience on PS in Japan has moved on from buying games and Nintendo has such dominant footing with the rest of the gaming audience in Japan.