Late last year, both the PS4 and Xbox One were released in China. Much to the excitement of industry analysts, who were frothing at the mouth at the amount of units both companies would sell. The reality in fact has been far starker.
Bear in mind that China hasn’t had games consoles released officially until very recently and the main gaming platform of choice has been the PC.
Unsurprisingly, PC gaming in China is absolutely massive and its uptake of various freemium titles has been the stuff of fiscal legend. China is also unique in the nature and breadth of its PC gaming obsession.
In that trying to repeat the same game types and monetization models outside of Asia hasn’t exactly resulted in the same fountains of cash as seen in China.
Likewise the idea that China would absorb gaming consoles with the same fervor as in the US and Europe has been proven to be not the case.
In the last year both the PS4 and Xbox One have only managed to sell 550,000 consoles. That’s a combined figure as well and it is woefully low compared to figures in the US and Europe, even in Japan in fact.
Some of this is down to Chinese legislation that is limiting the number of games released on either console but the main issue is the fact that other forms of gaming are more widely available for a greatly reduced cost.
Either way it seems that Chinese gamers are going after the platforms they find familiar and that’s very much the PC in this case. With that in mind it will be interesting to see how both
There’s definitely a massive market available but the appeal consoles have in China is clearly interpreted very differently than it is in the West. Of the two platforms though, the PS4 has more of a chance if Sony can leverage its Japanese software library there.
While diplomatic relations between China and Japan are suitably frosty, Japanese pop-culture is still very popular in China and that holds true for games (especially those tied into anime and manga).
In any case it’s clear that for both consoles, a Chinese release hasn’t resulted in the huge financial success people were expecting. It will be interesting to see if either company manages to improve their strategy in appealing to a clearly very different consumer base in the future though.
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