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The story
The “GEHA” (hardware/industry) board on 5ch lit up with debate over whether the PS5 can hit “15-15” — a benchmark used to gauge the console’s performance — by the end of the year. Posters worked through the roster of titles slated for release from September onward to check the numbers, while also citing data showing that digital downloads now make up 82% of PS5 software sales this fiscal year, and pointing out that preorders for the highly anticipated Ace Combat 8 have stalled just five weeks before launch.
Much of the thread’s second half devolved into sniping at a few regular posters, so this article has been trimmed down to the substantive exchanges that cite actual numbers and titles.
What people said
September
The Blood of Dawnwalker — Sep 3
Which ones specifically?
NBA 2K27
Kemono Heroes
EA SPORTS FC 27
Castlevania: Belmont's Curse
9 Years of Shadows
Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 4
These are already out on Switch/Switch 2
Sōshin no Ars Magna (JP-only title, no confirmed English name)
Gear Club Unlimited 3
Back to the Dawn
Wait, if you cross those off, doesn't the count drop below 15?
Guess it's not happening then.
Thanks, fixed it
September
The Blood of Dawnwalker — Sep 3
Marvel's Wolverine — Sep 15
Mortal Shell II — Sep 17
SILENT HILL: Townfall — Sep 24
CONTROL Resonant — Sep 24
ACE COMBAT 8: WINGS OF THEVE — Sep 29
October
Star Wars: Galactic Racer — Oct 6
Stupid Never Dies—Oct 22
Aliens: Fireteam Elite 2—Oct 22
Phantom Blade Zero — Oct 29
November
Grand Theft Auto VI — Nov 19
Aliens: Fireteam Elite 2
That one's also coming to Switch 2 this fall.
Actually, if it's October, wouldn't Japan get it day-and-date?
Wolverine hasn't even come out yet though.
Hey, don't just ignore me
Explain it already.
Right now all we've got is a console-sales bump from the extra State of Play and GTA
Honestly I expected more software than this
So much got shown at the June State of Play — where did it all go?
Nothing's gonna change, right?
Apparently we dance for three days and three nights straight and pass the tale down for generations.
Because the PS5 looks set to go down as the console that never scored a single million-seller in Japan during its whole lifespan — the so-called "million-seller virgin king" (5ch mockery for a console that can't crack a million) — let alone hit 15-15.
Well, with the digital ratio this high it's basically impossible
PS paid software units sold, Q1
Fiscal Year Total Digital (share) Packaged shipped
FY2016 36.70M 10.64M (29%) 26.05M units
FY2026 66.10M 54.20M (82%) 11.89M units
Well yeah, packaged games only have a 10% share domestically in FY2026.
Combined across all editions it's sitting at just 1,200 points on Amazon Japan's preorder ranking
That's not looking great…
Initial preorders were climbing pretty well, but it's rough that the numbers kept dropping even into August
Standard edition at 800+100 points five weeks before launch isn't great
That's basically the same as "Rinkane" (5ch shorthand for another title, used here for comparison)
If that were true, wouldn't it have already been announced at a Nintendo Direct?
He'll probably be gone within two years
Physical media's on its way out anyway lol
I think it'll go a bit further than that
Up to around 22-8
For the first week of October (the week Ace Combat launches)
Ace Combat
Musou 2 Remaster
Ghost of Yōtei (Director's Cut)
FC27
Silent Hill
Wolverine
Trails (Kiseki)
Onimusha
These eight titles are all likely to chart
Counting overlaps, it might actually get surprisingly close. But a lot of these look like the type to crash hard from week two on, so even 22-8 seems like a stretch
Background and Key Points
The “GEHA” board is 5ch’s hardware/industry forum, one of the main gathering points for Japanese console-sales obsessives, and “15-15” is shorthand chart jargon from that community for a PS5 milestone tied to Japan’s weekly physical retail rankings (Famitsu/Media Create), not global or digital totals. That distinction matters because Japan’s retail market has changed shape dramatically under PS5: the thread’s own numbers show digital’s share of PS lifetime software sales rising from 29% in FY2016 to 82% in FY2026, leaving packaged (physical, boxed) sales at just 10% of the domestic total. A chart built around physical units is being asked to prove something about a console whose home market barely buys physical anymore — and, as one poster notes, PS5 has yet to produce a single Japanese million-seller title at all, a first for a mainline PlayStation.
The thread’s actual disagreement isn’t over whether enough games are coming out — everyone agrees September through November is stacked — it’s over which of those games should even count. Several titles on the early tally (NBA 2K27, EA Sports FC 27, Call of Duty MW4, etc.) are simultaneous or prior Switch/Switch 2 releases, and posters argued these shouldn’t be credited toward a supposedly PS5-specific, physical-chart benchmark, which knocked the count down before it was rebuilt around PS5-exclusive-timed releases like Ace Combat 8 and GTA VI.
What the thread never addresses is that a shrinking physical market makes “15-15” progressively easier to miss for reasons unrelated to a game’s actual popularity — Ace Combat 8’s soft Amazon preorder ranking five weeks out could reflect digital pre-purchases invisible to that same ranking, not weak demand.
*This article is excerpted and summarized from the 5ch (Hardware/Industry, aka “GEHA”) thread【Are the People Saying PS5 Can’t Hit 15-15 Serious?】.
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