 So I thought when I'd be talking about the week 52 sales, aka the final week of sales in Japan, which this is supposed to be the massive week we'd be talking about the Nintendo Switch and how much it's dominating, and of course it is dominating, and we're going to talk about that. But that's not actually the shocking part, because it was expected. No, the Switch did not cross 6 million in sales, like some hoped it needed to sell about 321,000 units, and it only sold 278,000, oh no, poor Nintendo. But we'll get into those sales in a little bit, because actually something else extremely shocking is happening in Japan. I don't even know how to describe it, but before I can get into talking about that, I gotta remind you, we have a huge giveaway going on this month. You can win the PlayStation 5, or an Xbox Series X, or a Nintendo Switch. There's details on how to enter down in the description, the winner will be announced during a live stream at the end of the month. Also if we somehow, Miracles, do happen, and we hit 70,000 subscribers this month, we'll give away two systems, not just one. So yeah, let's make that happen. Alright, so speaking of PlayStation 5, I know we're giving one away. I know it's impossible to get, but PlayStation 5 is tanking in Japan. So yes, the Nintendo Switch is still dominating. Sales boost over last week, you know it was only about 15,000 units. They were going back to lotteries again. Switch sold out all that jazz. Okay fine, 278,000 units. They ended the full year of 2020 at 5,957,000 units sold. That's nearly a 2 million increase, or I guess closer to 1.5 million increase over the prior year, where the Switch sold in 2019, 4,493,000 units. Now it's over 17 million in Japan, but this is where things are really really interesting. So yeah, it's like 8 million units or so ahead of the PlayStation 4. Obviously the next target up is another 7 million or so, 8 million or so to try to pass 3DS. But here's the thing. PlayStation 5 has been in Japan now for a number of weeks and it only sold 13,000 units last week. Now to put this in perspective, the PlayStation 4 sold 12,600. It only outsold the PlayStation 4 during the highest sales week in Japan by 400 units. Now I really, I couldn't believe this chart, so I did some digging to make sure. And PlayStation 5 is currently being dominated by the launch of the Wii U. So not only did the Wii U launch at a higher number of units during its first week, we are now 7 weeks into sales for PlayStation 5 and it's barely creeping up towards 300,000 units. The Wii U in the same 7 week period was over 700,000 units sold in Japan. Guys, in Japan, am I talking worldwide? We all know Wii U is a flop worldwide. In Japan, Wii U was apparently more popular than the PlayStation 5. Now there has been talks about this going on for a little while now because the launch numbers for PlayStation 5 already were not that impressive and people were wondering what the hell is going on. This is the home country for Sony. Sony has traditionally done really really well. I mean, yeah, we're not expecting it to do switch numbers at this point, but the PlayStation 4 is almost at 10 million sales so like it's not, Sony's basically owned the home console market in Japan for so long and you could try to chalk up switch success like oh it's also portable. So okay if you wanted to dismiss switch, that's fine, but how do you dismiss the fact that PlayStation 5 can't even keep pace with the failed to launch only sold 13 million units worldwide Wii U? This is concerning. Now obviously there's shortages for PlayStation 5 worldwide and Sony is specifically bringing units to certain areas over others. That's just how it goes when you have supply shortages, you gotta prioritize what countries get what units and clearly they're not prioritizing Japan which is strange for a company located in Japan, but actually Sony made some changes over the last few years. Number one, there are worldwide headquarters are no longer in Japan. They actually moved them to California and we have not seen any negative impact of this for Japanese gamers until basically now where you could tell Sony is no longer prioritizing Japan as a major sales territory. The 13,000 they sold last week of PlayStation 5 was every single unit of PlayStation 5 they sent to Japan so we don't even really know what the demand is for PlayStation 5 because they're not even coming close to sending enough units to Japan to find out. So yeah, the Wii U crushed, absolutely crushed the PlayStation 5 in its first two months on the market but also Nintendo was actually providing units to buy whereas Sony are practically abandoning Japan. And this is very very strange for a country that is still deeply rooted in Japan despite the worldwide headquarters being moved over to the United States. So if you're in Japan and you've been a Sony gamer for a long time one, I feel sorry. I did not expect Sony to truly give Japan kind of like the I don't want to say third world treatment but definitely not treating it as an upper echelon sales territory anymore. I mean 10 million units I get that the PlayStation 4 has sold 100 million plus units or whatever. I get that. Think about that. One tenth of the sales were in Japan. One tenth. That's not something to laugh at. Maybe that's not the 30-40 million that happens like in the United States but still. That is nothing to scoff at. That is still makes Japan a top 10 country for Sony sales. But not now. Now you're starting to see Germany, you're starting to see Poland, France, other countries selling more units because they're getting more units than Japan. Japan's ranking in terms of where Sony is providing units to and prioritizing is somewhere down in the 20s and 30s. It's insane to think that the home country of Sony is just kind of being abandoned. Now some of this is probably because hey, everyone is in China now. China is potentially the largest market in the world, whoever can blow up and become successful there could easily have the first 200-300 million console ever. I mean there's a reason that you can hate Tencent and all that but Nintendo of course partnered with Tencent because if they can get massive penetration with Switch, which they're actually making some ground there, in China, I mean you could look at next year as we looked at oh man, Nintendo Switch has the best year ever. Well if you include China sales in 2021, I mean holy crap, Switch could end up at 40-50 million sales in a single year if they penetrate correctly. So you can understand why, okay, there's maybe more of a focus on this new market now that the restrictions are gone and China's allowing the sales of video game consoles across the whole country, not just in Hong Kong through some interesting means or back when this system man was in place in China for a long time where they wouldn't let video game consoles come in. Yeah, like these IQ players that were technically made by Nintendo but weren't official, quote unquote official, it was very strange how companies got into China in the past. But now you can release a Switch, a PlayStation 5, an Xbox Series X or S, you can release that straight up in China now. You probably have to partner with someone like Tencent who owns a huge chunk of the video game market there, China doesn't have laws that prevent monopolies and all that. So you've got to go with, you know, I guess an evil company if you really want to make some progress in there. And I'm not trying to argue that everything Tencent does is bad, I'm sure they do some good somewhere, I don't know, every company does some good somewhere but I just, you know, most billion dollar corporations have quite a lot of bad stuff happening and this includes Nintendo by the way and Sony. Our favorite companies, just because they make products we like, you know, Apple doesn't mean that these companies are free from criticism and free from doing some really shady stuff because everyone, especially in tech, is extremely involved in shady practices. We've heard about some slave labor possibly happening in China, obviously there's the blood diamonds and it goes beyond diamonds, it's in the metals as well with slave labor and people dying in mines and it's just, there's not necessarily the most ethical things happening in the world of tech, but this to me is almost egregious for a company founded in Japan, a company deeply seated in Japan, a company whose president of the entire company still technically resides in Japan despite the headquarters now being in the United States. I find this to be wholly interesting that basically Japan is not a priority for Sony anymore. I mean, if you look at the actual sales case, so I'll talk about how the Wii U sold over 700,000 during the same lifespan, well the PlayStation 5 is at 255,000 units lifetime to date over the first seven weeks on the market, that is, I mean, not even half of what the Wii U was doing in Japan, a system that bombed in Japan, bombed in Japan and it's just, I'm not saying the PlayStation 5 isn't gonna outsell the Wii U long haul, I don't, the Wii U did not sell well, so I presume the PlayStation 5 will outsell the Wii U in Japan long haul, obviously PlayStation 5 is probably already outsold the Wii U lifetime to date, worldwide, but this is, I mean, as you see with Nintendo, it's not like Japan's a small market, this is the highest sales day, or sales week I guess of the year, and Nintendo sold 278,000, they might have sold over a million units in Japan just this month, this is not a tiny market, this is not some dinky, ignorant people aren't gonna buy things market, Japan is a massive video game market, massive, and right now Nintendo's the only thing that sells there, oh yeah, we have 13,000, 13,000 PlayStation 5's, congratulations, you almost lost out to the PlayStation 4, and the Nintendo Switch, I mean, Nintendo Switch is basically wiping its butt with your sales, and I get that this is like the highest sale, but like last week was not the highest week, and Nintendo switched to 263,000, in fact, Nintendo doing over 150,000 units with the Switch is just a normal weekly occurrence, like they'll have weeks where they dip down to like 60, 70, 80,000, those are bad weeks for Switch, 60, 70, 80,000 is a bad week for Switch, PlayStation 5 is at 13, this is, I don't know what Sony is doing, Sony has made quite a number of baffling decisions, you know, heading into PlayStation 5's launch and post launch, they still do some things right, the games are obviously still really really good, Miles Morales, really really good, that Demon's Souls remastered, really really good, like they still do like a make and provide really great content, and that content is largely why a lot of people buy into Sony's platforms, the DualSense controller for all intents and purposes is a very, very nice controller, although some people are having some issues with the triggers, I kind of first saw some of the trigger issues happening where basically those adaptive triggers break, if you actually look at the mechanism, they're using a plastic coil, and plastic does just not have long term rigidity, so the more times you use it and you get that force feedback, the higher likelihood that that plastic is going to bend, it's going to crack, it's going to break, and that seems to be what's happening, some issues are happening with the spring that's in there as well, so I always thought that it was a really cool idea about those triggers, but how it's engineered I'm not sure is really made to last, but still the DualSense controller overall is really really cool, and to talk more positive, hey that PlayStation 5 UI, I mean it's nice, some of the UI features, the help, the little help videos, like great, there's some really cool stuff going on there, but not everything is always so great in the world of Sony, and there's some stuff behind the scenes, there's some stuff that's front facing that isn't good, and the same is true for Nintendo, it's just Nintendo stuff is more blatant, because you can literally just load up the switch and instantly be like, oh hey I have Joy-Con drift, or oh hey I still can't theme, oh hey there's no music or anything to like let you know you'll even turn the system on, oh hey you know it's a little hard to navigate that eShop, oh hey I still can't organize my games perfectly the way I want to let alone put them into folders, oh hey this, oh hey that, oh hey now that it's been you know a few years the UI isn't really feeling as snappy as it once did now that we have next-gen systems out with full SSDs, oh man like there's just you know some games just running like crap you know you load up Hyrule Warriors, Age of Calamity and it's a great experience and I had a lot of fun with it, but it's undeniable that it's one of the worst you know in terms of performance, in terms of FPS and resolution on the platform, and while Musou games always have this issue it's not exclusive to Musou games we have already seen a number of games struggling to run well on switch so the issues with switch are more apparent and this is before you get online before you realize you can't do a local voice chat or even texting other people you can't like message someone at all just doesn't exist Nintendo had a great idea at one point a meverse that could have been expanded then they got rid of it they could have just renamed it or something so it didn't have to be revolved around me, but Nintendo has these great ideas and they seem to just throw them away they got rid of friend codes finally acting like the rest of the world only to bring them back I I honestly don't know what Nintendo is doing and a lot of these things are so easy to be critical of Sony has less and less flubs like that to be critical of the flubs for Sony are usually of a bigger variety things like oh we're gonna have you know we're gonna mess around with that backwards compatibility we're gonna have it then we're not gonna have it we're gonna have it then we're not gonna have they ended up including it but really confusing messaging on that oh and what about like game upgrades oh if you buy a PlayStation 4 version do you get the free upgrades in the next generation no you have to spend 70 plus dollars to to get the remastered version of spider-man now they're trying to backtrack on that as well like it's weird there's weird things going on Microsoft isn't free from all this as well Microsoft is obviously had lots of strange things happening but I mean really the big thing that's how Microsoft is game pass is really really cool an X cloud in its beta alpha whatever it is on Android works really really well so X cloud works really really well game pass is great maybe the greatest value in gaming and then obviously you know they have their interest strategy with the Xbox series S which now has become like the greatest emulation machine on the planet I mean it's not technically the X would be a better emulation machine but I mean the S is so much cheaper like 300 bucks to basically have a machine that emulates things all the way up through like PlayStation 2 that's insane like that's really cheap and Microsoft doesn't stop it they actually kind of promote it you just spend 20 bucks on a dev tool and then you basically within like a half hour can be up and running playing a bunch of emulated games and Microsoft doesn't care because hey use our system like a PC what do we care it's your system do what you want it's kind of refreshing there's also downfalls to them they've been really lacking in games and people are not happy that they bought Bethesda because Bethesda was making games for everything and now they only make games likely for Microsoft you know you have Phil Spencer recently call and say yeah Bethesda is important to the future of Xbox well I mean that definitely sounds like you're gonna make games exclusive because wouldn't it just be important to the future of gaming otherwise so yeah I what we're in interesting times I don't know what's gonna happen here in 2021 I just know that we you crushed PlayStation 5's launch and it's not even close in Japan switch you're doing good switch is still owning like 29 of the top 30 software sales top 5 software for those wondering you know you have momotoro dentetsu at number one you have animal crossing new horizons at number two ring finna venture number 3 mark art 8 deluxe at number 4 super smash rules at number 5 you kind of get the drift Nintendo and games released on Nintendo's platform dominate dominated Japan so I folks enter that giveaway otherwise I'll catch you in the next video