Last week was encouraging- the PS4 Pro launched extremely strongly in Japan, and I expressed hope for the state of the Japanese console gaming market. However, it looks like the spike and the excitement was only temporary, because the numbers for this week of sales in Japan are in (via NeoGAF), and the PS4 Pro really took a hell of a beating.
The PS4 family of systems put together sold a little over 37,000 units last week- which actually isn’t low at all, especially as a baseline for the PS4. The trouble is that the Pro did not pull its weight for these sales. The PS4 Pro accounted for only a little over 11,000 units sold of these, down from 65,000 sold last week. It’s a sharp decline, and it seems to indicate that less than a third of the people buying a PS4 last week wanted to pick up the Pro.
In this case, I want to hope that this trend is localized to Japan, and not indicative of the PS4 Pro’s performance worldwide- I think that iterative consoles are an important concept, one that need to be a success. That said, this is probably eerily familiar for Sony- earlier this year, the PlayStation VR launched very well in Japan before it, too, saw its sales plummet.
Strong first week sales are always great- but unless Sony can sustain interest in their hardware, those first week sales become just a flash in the pan.
