Japan Monthly Report for September 2016

In the US and Europe there are market research firms that release a monthly report about how the industry is doing, hardware and software sales, these are the NPD Group and the Gfk. As they are the only companies to do that business in those areas their numbers are, for the most part, not revealed to the public, that of course isn't an issue in Japan where we have 3 trackers that release data on a weekly basis.

Due to that all the information on this blog post is freely available on the website (as well as other corners of the internet) for anyone to use so if you want to check the data yourself go to Game Data Library, where all the data is listed.

That's that for the introduction, this post will have similar information that the Gfk and NPD Group makes public on a monthly basis: bestselling games, best-selling hardware, software and hardware moved as well as any more relevant information, so with that out of the way let's get going.

For all intents and purposes the period we're calling September was from August 29th to October 2nd (5 weeks).

Last month’s entry of this series was more or less a test on how these blogs will work, this time we’re for real and to keep things better organized we’ll be dividing it into three pieces, first we’ll discuss what happened last month on units sold, then on revenue and finally a retro look at what happened 10 and 20 years ago.

But wait! You probably said to yourself, last month I said that revenue talk was no good as we don’t get that kind of data. That’s true, but just for fun we’ll be doing some math given the data we have.

All software information here is just retail data.

Units Discussion

Japan’s bestselling games during September 2016 were:

1. [PS4] Persona 5: 329.484
2. [3DS] Yo-kai Watch 3: Sushi / Tempura: 147.291
3. [PS3] Persona 5: 98.445
4. [PS4] Winning Eleven 2017: 75.400
5. [PS4] FIFA 17: 52.544
6. [PSV] Utawarerumono: Futari no Hakuoro: 51.464
7. [PS3] Winning Eleven 2017: 43.583
8. [PS4] Utawarerumono: Futari no Hakuoro: 39.643
9. [3DS] Puzzles & Dragons X: Dragon Chapter / God Chapter: 39.158
10. [WIU] Minecraft: Wii U Edition: 31.284

Japan’s biggest publishers during September 2016 were:

1. Atlus: 427.929
2. Level 5: 147.291
3. Konami: 118.983
4. Aqua Plus: 104.433
5. Bandai Namco: 90.107

This data is taken only from the top 30 and is therefore incomplete.

Retail software sales per platform were:

1. PlayStation 4: 805.294
2. Nintendo 3DS: 542.295
3. PlayStation Vita: 252.741
4. PlayStation 3: 221.955
5. Wii U: 116.588
6. Xbox One: 6.397

As a whole there were 1.945.270 games sold during September, a small increase over last month, though it’s a huge drop from September 2015, where 3.249.088 games were sold, a +40% drop. Persona 5 couldn’t make up for Metal Gear Solid V and Super Mario Maker on the home console front and Yo-kai Watch 3 had no chance against lasting sales of Dragon Quest VIII, Animal Crossing: Happy Home Designer and Yo-kai Watch Busters, hence the big drop.

3DS is mainly to blame for the losses with 700k less units sold compared to last September, though every system sold less from that period with the exception of the PlayStation 4 which had its best month yet.

Yes, in fact things are very sunny over at the PlayStation 4, huh, garden. Not only was September 2016 a noticeable improvement over September 2015 on software sales, but also on hardware sales. The biggest game of the month sold the most on PlayStation 4 and is now one of the bestselling games of the system. Persona 5 and the new PlayStation 4 managed to outdo Metal Gear from last year, software sales were up over 25% from September last year, and more importantly it already outdid its total software sales of 2015 as a whole, in nine months, it should be the only system not on negative numbers for the whole year.

By the end of September more than 19.505.650 games have been sold for the year so far, a drop of 5 million units from last year (more than 20%), 3DS still makes most of it with 7.5 million games sold, though PlayStation 4 is caching up at 5.2 million.

Nothing else to say here, so moving onto hardware.

Japan's hardware sales during September 2016 were:

1. PlayStation 4: 185.739
2. New Nintendo 3DS XL: 81.946
3. PlayStation Vita: 52.466
4. Nintendo 2DS: 43.841
5. New Nintendo 3DS: 16.240
6. Wii U: 14.915
7. PlayStation 3: 3.947
8. Nintendo 3DS: 2.212
9. Xbox One: 759
10. Nintendo 3DS XL: 497

There was a new piece of hardware released this month, the Nintendo 2DS, not much was expected for it, so it did alright really, it’s been holding rather well actually, will be interesting to see how it performs going forward.

The biggest story of the month of course is the PlayStation 4, with 185k units sold it had one it’s best months ever, a 300% increase from last month and a near 40% increase from last September, over 3 million units have been sold so far, with nearly 1 million sold this year alone.

Not much to say about anything else, Wii U sales have been steadily dropping the last few weeks and that won’t stop, Splatoon sales are collapsing as well, hype for the game and the system are gone.

As a whole, there were 402.562 units of hardware sold in September, a notable increase from the 239k sold last month, compared to last September is a drop, but rather a small one of just 10%

The culprit for the loss is the Wii U who was down by over 60k units, in fact there were two weeks last September were there were more systems sold than during September 2016 as a whole.

Going back to PlayStation 4 one last time, 2016 will be the first time that a home console will be the best selling hardware SKU of that year since 2004, which is to say, the PlayStation 4 will sell more than any individual 3DS model, but probably not more than all combined. The last console to do this was the PlayStation 2.

Now for the new stuff, let’s talk revenue.

Revenue Discussion

Last month I mentioned that doing revenue calculations was rather pointless as the data we have is not capable of giving us that kind of information, however, just for fun I decided to look at a way to at least get what could be the minimum money spent on videogames in Japan during September 2016. A disclaimer of course, this part is rather for fun and shouldn’t be taken as a hard truth, for that look at what’s up and down this section.

So, how are we getting these numbers? Pretty straightforward, for games:

• First, If the game was released during this month, then we are going to assume all copies sold during launch week were sold at full price, and all copies sold afterwards were sold at whatever discounted price Amazon.jp had it by the end of the month. For example, we’re saying that all 268.320 units of Persona 5 sold at launch were sold at ¥9.504 and all 61.164 copies sold since were sold at the discounted price of ¥7.679.
• Second, if the game wasn’t release during the month we’ll be assuming all copies sold on the month were sold at the price Amazon.jp had listed by the end of the month, for example, Yo-kai Watch 3 launched at the price of ¥4.800, but we’re saying all copies sold on September were sold at ¥4.080.
• Finally, we’ll assume that there’s just one SKU for all games, the cheapest one, once again returning to Persona 5, for this exercise we say that the 20^th Anniversary Box doesn’t exist, nor the bundle and that all copies were sold at the prices mentioned before, this goes for all kinds of Limited Editions and bundles, as far as we know bundles don’t exist and all games were sold at a standard price.

With that in mind, Japan’s top grossing games during September 2016 could be:

1. [PS4] Persona 5: ¥3.019.791.636 (launch price: ¥9.504, standard price: ¥7.679)
2. [PS3] Persona 5: ¥894.691.532 (launch price: ¥9.504, standard price: ¥7.636)
3. [3DS] Yo-kai Watch 3: Sushi / Tempura: ¥600.947.280 (standard price: ¥4.080)
4. [PS4] Winning Eleven 2017: ¥574.404.900 (launch price: ¥8.208, standard price: ¥6.478)
5. [PS4] FIFA 17: ¥442.630.656 (launch price: ¥8.424)
6. [PSV] Utawarerumono: Futari no Hakuoro: ¥370.840.467 (launch price: ¥7.344, standard price: ¥5.957)
7. [PS4] Utawarerumono: Futari no Hakuoro: ¥285.272.956 (launch price: ¥9.504, standard price: ¥5.830)
8. [PS3] Winning Eleven 2017: ¥284.441.592 (launch price: ¥7.128, standard price: ¥5.480)
9. [3DS] Puzzles & Dragons X: God Chapter / Dragon Chapter: ¥161.330.960 (standard price: ¥4.120)
10. [PS4] Tales of Berseria: ¥155.309.715 (standard price: ¥6.963) |ONE WEEK OF DATA MISSING|

Meanwhile the top grossing publishers might’ve been:

1. Atlus: ¥3.914.483.168
2. Konami : ¥858.846.492
3. Aqua Plus: ¥753.979.567
4. Level 5: ¥600.947.280
5. Electronic Arts: ¥546.608.088

We’re missing a huge amount of data for this to be correct so it’s more like an educated guest, once again, like with everything else in this section, take it with a grain of salt.

When doing gross per platform things get even worse as the data we have is extremely incomplete, just the top 30 doesn’t tell us the whole story, and sadly, that’s everything we have.

To give you an example, just from the top 30 we know that 612.246 PlayStation 4 games were sold, but as mentioned in the previous section the actual number is over 805k, so we have nearly 190k units not accounted for, the situation gets even worse when we talk about the Xbox One, there were no games in the top 30 at all, so we just don’t have any data.

So, with that in mind, gross by platform could be, at its minimum:

1. PlayStation 4: ¥4.977.594.325
2. PlayStation 3: ¥1.477.697.864
3. Nintendo 3DS: ¥1.415.685.320
4. PlayStation Vita: ¥525.639.163
5. Wii U: ¥227.729.416
6. Xbox One: Unknown

Total gross, across 1.280.324 games sold during September could be around ¥8.624.346.088, or around $83.782.761.

Alright then, now onto hardware, once again we have a set of guidelines.

• We’re going to assume all consoles were sold at its lowest possible price and that where was just one SKU for all of them. For example, there is just one 500gb PlayStation 4, the more expensive 1tb one doesn’t exist.
• PlayStation 4 is a special case, we know some units were sold at a certain price and others not, so for this exercise we’ll say that units sold between August 29^th and September 12^th were sold at ¥34.980 while all units after that were sold at ¥29.980.
• Bundles don’t exist.

With that said, gross by hardware sales, at its minimum, could be:

1. PlayStation 4: ¥5.581.785.220 (old price: ¥34.980, standard price: ¥29.980)
2. New Nintendo 3DS XL: ¥1.663.831.584 (standard price: ¥20.304)
3. PlayStation Vita: ¥995.804.680 (standard price: ¥18.980)
4. Wii U: ¥483.246.000 (standard price: ¥32.400)
5. Nintendo 2DS: ¥429.641.800 (standard price: ¥9.800)
6. New Nintendo 3DS: ¥280.627.200 (standard price: ¥17.280)
7. PlayStation 3: ¥102.543.060 (standard price: ¥25.980)
8. Nintendo 3DS: ¥34.128.948 (standard price: ¥15.429)
9. Xbox One: ¥22.754.820 (standard price: ¥29.980)
10. Nintendo 3DS XL: ¥9.661.680 (standard price: ¥19.440)

Meaning that total gross across all hardware could be around ¥9.604.024.992, about $93.300.028.

If we were to breakdown gross by ecosystems, just in hardware sales, then for September we should be looking at this:

1. PlayStation ecosystem: ¥6.680.132.960 ($64.920.782)
2. Nintendo ecosystem: ¥2.901.137.212 ($28.194.662)
3. Xbox ecosystem: ¥22.754.820 ($221.145)

When combining the software and hardware data, then we could say that at minimum, it’s likely that ¥18.228.371.080 ($177.154.955) were spent on dedicated gaming hardware and software for the month of September 2016.

Once again, breaking this down by ecosystems:

1. PlayStation ecosystem: ¥13.661.064.312 ($132.715.028)
2. Nintendo ecosystem: ¥4.544.551.948 ($44.149.011)
3. Xbox ecosystem: ¥22.754.820 ($221.145)

Once again, this doesn’t give us the full story as we’re missing 1/3 of the total software sales and we can’t really know at what price everything was sold, so we’re still getting an estimate that should be lower, even considerably so, than the actual number, though once again, it’s fun data to look at.

This still list a rather clear picture, in September PlayStation generated more money than Nintendo and those kind of results are the ones we are really interested in.

To end, the retro look, let’s look at what happened in September 2006 and September 1996, this time it’s just units sold.

Retro Discussion

Bestselling games of September 2006

1. [NDS] Pokémon Diamond / Pearl: 1.586.360
2. [PS2] Hot Shot Tennis: 363.750
3. [NDS] Final Fantasy III: 218.001
4. [NDS] New Super Mario Bros. Wii: 218.001
5. [NDS] Brain Age 2: More Training in Minutes a Day: 209.849

Biggest Publishers

1. Pokémon Co: 1.586.360
2. Nintendo: 917.647
3. Sony Computer Entertainment: 376.816

There were 4 million games sold on September 2006 and 889k units of hardware, the Nintendo DS was dominating the industry as it had the lion share of both as 2.9 million DS games were sold and 662k systems, the 6 year sold PlayStation 2 was the second one, by a huge margin, with 800k games sold and 114k consoles.

By this point, the GameCube and Game Boy Advance were done for, the PSP was failing to get anything going and so was the Xbox 360.

Bestselling games of September 1996

1. [PS1] Persona: 263.808
2. [SAT] Street Fighter Alpha 2: 240.193
3. [SAT] Sakura Wars: 205.270
4. [SAT] Mobile Suit Gundam Side Story: 163.673
5. [PS1] Smash Court: 136.585

Biggest publishers

1. Capcom: 351.351
2. SEGA: 320.805
3. Atlus: 263.808

The PlayStation and the Saturn were still fighting the battle for software, but on the hardware side the battle was over as the Saturn was barely keeping up with the Nintendo 64, over 2 million games were sold, with about 80% of it just being Saturn and PlayStation software, over 900k each, PlayStation having a slight edge. The Nintendo 64 was barely moving 100k units, nearly 100% of handheld software sales were just Pokémon.

Once again hardware data is incomplete, but all consoles moved more than 300k units, how much it’s hard to tell though, the Nintendo 64 moved about 64k units and the Saturn maybe some 15k more, the PlayStation more than both combined.

That’s all for now, thanks for visiting.