Bottom line: these charts are not surprising. Italians love footy, shooters and multiplayer games, and they like the PlayStation because it's cool and cheaper than the alternatives. There's hardly what you'd call a "gaming culture" here.
Not entirely accurate. For the better part of the past 12 years, Xboxes could be had cheaper than PlayStations. Xbox 360 was almost always cheaper than PS3, and Xbox One has been cheaper on average than PS4s for a while now. Xbox would frequently go below 200, which is harder to see on PlayStation. The thing is, however, is relatively smaller shops often don't even really keep Xboxes, or if so they keep some superold model just 'cause they got it stuck since launch. A year ago or so I saw 499 Euros launch Xbox One with the Kinect - who the fuck would buy that at said price? Italians are also very habitual buyers - PES was already kinda failing some years ago, and it was still doing incredible numbers in Italy, probably much thanks to that shitty popular rap song about the dude smoking and playing PES. And don't forget, in Italy you still see newspapers, TVs, radios, etc. refer to videogames and consoles as "playstations", like with Nintendo in the 80's in the USA. Most of those shitty YouTubers people look up to? Playing on PlayStation 4. There is no denying Sony did a great job, but PlayStation 1 and 2 were a lot of people's first foray into gaming, and that's when media started talking about it too. On channels like MTV (the good old days when it wasn't pure trash) you had shows about PlayStation games, not so much for Nintendo or Sega consoles. PS3 was doing pretty well even when the Wii and X360 were slaying it with lower prices, and as soon as PS3 became accessible price-wise, it didn't take Sony long to win fans back.
PlayStation in Italy is a household name, much more than Microsoft, Nintendo, Wii, Xbox, or other terms. When you watch Formula 1 on TV and the commentators talk about how today's young drivers "drive on playstations", or when you watch the news about Astori's death about how he and his buddies were messing around on the "playstation" (regardless of what it was), it's basically a major term, and shops make sure to always have PlayStation stuff. My local Esselunga, for example, doesn't keep Nintendo or Microsoft stuff from a while, but the PS4 games are always there, even the ones that remain unsold for months. Not to mention how major Italian publications like multiplayer.it and IGN are largely skewed in Sony's favor, which then becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy: you push the narrative that Sony rules regardless, and people buy their products so they do indeed rule. Not downplaying Sony's merits, but the thing is, they've got Italy locked down due to a series of circumstances (some self-made, others by luck) which made it so that PS1 basically exploded over here more than any other console, and PS2 followed suit. It's telling that the only time a PlayStation console wasn't slaying everyone else was when they priced the PS3 600 Euros - as soon as it went to acceptable prices, business as usual went on. And the PS1 era dominance is telling especially on Crash making the top 3. That's some insane levels of nostalgia.
