JJapan News

Sony Announces Cheaper Japanese-Language Only PS5 Just for Japan

  • November 12, 2025


Sony Announces Cheaper Japanese-Language Only PS5 Just for Japan

by razorbeamz

12 comments

  3. Fucking hell. Again?
    I bought a Sony FX3 in Japan, and I had a reason why it had to be bought while I was in Japan. The internet said that you could buy an “international version” for more money that had English. I had my Japanese wife call 10 different shops, including the official Sony store and most of them had never even heard of such a thing. One of them said it was called the tourist version. One of them even called us back an hour later and said that a tourist version was never released for the FX3 in Japan. But I needed it. I ended up buying and hacking a camera that cost over $3k just to get English on it.

  4. Awesome if you are native in Japanese.
    Awful for most of the foreigners living in Japan. 

    Ive been roasted on reddit for saying that, most of the comments being like “you are in Japan learn Japanese dumbass”

    I do speak Japanese at a business level, which is enough for Mario Kart, but not enough if you want to play an Rpg and understand each characteristics of some magic artefact or spells. 

  5. Kinda funny because for the PSP era it was the other way around. PSP did extremely poorly abroad but sold like crazy in Japan, leading to people importing foreign language games from the rest of asia.

  6. I dunno how having a monolingual piece of hardware reduces costs enough to reduce the sales price, but ¯_(ツ)_/¯

  10. This is just the dumbest thing ever… every store and second hand shop has a stack of used and new PS5, Disc and Digital, and new Pros, for competitive prices here where I live in Japan. And I live in a mega rural place. There is next to no reason or actual desire for this Japan only Japanese model anymore.

    Maybe 3-4 years ago, sure, but it also has little to do with foreigners / resellers here as these post keep claiming.

    The lotto system doesn’t work great here anyways because people will just make bot accounts, and everyone hates it anyways even if they don’t express it. And the reason for the shortage of things like the PS5 at least a few years ago again has nothing to do with the reseller market although it’s not a non issue anywhere in the world.

    Even though Sony is a Japanese company, like so many other Japanese companies, because they can charge higher prices overseas, and because most of their consumer base is overseas / larger profit margins… they purposefully focused on exporting the lions share of their stock of xyz products and leave a minimal amount for the in country consumer.

    This was a well known issue for years with the PS5 here, it was a massive pain in the ass until fairly recently, now the market has a ton of new and used models, they are fairly easy to come by. But for example the first few years I was here… good luck getting one then. It was ridiculous. I don’t recall the overall numbers but it was like a literal 8 or 9 to 1 stock amount for in overseas vs japan distribution. It was openly discussed ad nauseam on Japanese media and news.

    So again long story short… no friggen clue what they are doing this or think it’s a good idea. I mean sure Japanese people will probably buy the cheaper option Japan only one but I don’t see how this move makes sense at all tbh.

    It’s like how 90% of most games are available in all languages now on all platforms even when I buy them in Japan… but then some of the largest series still aren’t… for literally no reason, even though if you buy them overseas they have all the languages on the same game same disc, looking at you Persona and Kingdom hearts. In the “digital” age these decisions make 0 sense at this point.

  11. Here come the 10-years-in-the-country but self-certified-N4-speakers crying and telling us how it marginalizes them

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