New Story of Seasons & Rune Factory 6 Footage Drops — 5ch Debates the PS5 Port

Background and Key Points

Story of Seasons is Marvelous’s long-running farming-sim franchise (known in Japan as Bokujō Monogatari), localized in the West as “Harvest Moon” by Natsume until a 2014 split sent Marvelous to publish it themselves under a new name. Rune Factory is its 2006-launched spinoff that bolts dungeon-crawling and combat onto the same farming loop. Both series have historically leaned on Nintendo hardware, and the sales figures cited in the thread — Famitsu-tracked Japanese charts, not global totals — show why: Story of Seasons: Let’s! Wind’s Grand Bazaar moved 95,817 units on Switch against under 1,310 on PS5, and Guardians of Azuma saw a similar 86,223-to-1,384 split. 5ch’s Hardware/Industry board (ゲハ) is a notoriously console-partisan space, so skepticism toward any PS5 push was baked in from the start.

The thread didn’t actually split over whether the numbers were bad — everyone agreed they were. It split over what they mean for a Switch-2-era, likely-multiplatform release: one camp read them as proof a PS5 SKU is dead weight for a niche JRPG-farming hybrid; another countered that the real problem was never PlayStation demand but Switch hardware bottlenecking Story of Seasons 5’s performance, pointing to a smoother Steam port as evidence multiplatform releases are worth doing regardless of Japanese chart position.

What nobody raises is that these figures are Japan-only physical/digital charts pulled from Famitsu-style tracking — they say nothing about Western digital sales on Steam or PlayStation, where localized farming-sim franchises often perform disproportionately well relative to their domestic footprint, which is the actual commercial case for a port these posters never engage with.