Japan Monthly Report for October 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 October was from October 3rd to October 28th (4 weeks).

This blog is split up into three parts: units sold, revenue and retro. On the units sold part we’ll talk about all the data officially released by Famitsu/Dengeki/Media Create, on the revenue part we’ll make rough estimates of the money generated from the numbers in the first part and finally on the retro talk we’ll briefly discussed what happened this month 10 and 20 years ago.

All software information here is just retail data.

Units Sold

Japan’s bestselling games during October 2016 were:

1. [3DS] Monster Hunter Stories: 246.400
2. [PS4] Battlefield 1: 165.866
3. [PSV] Sword Art Online: Hollow Realization: 74.399
4. [PS4] Sword Art Online: Hollow Realization: 66.110
5. [3DS] Yo-kai Watch 3: Sushi / Tempura: 57.182
6. [3DS] Mario Party: Star Rush: 55.609
7. [PS4] World of Final Fantasy: 53.944
8. [PSV] World of Final Fantasy: 53.755
9. [WIU] Paper Mario: Color Splash: 43.075
10. [PS4] BlazBlue: Central Fiction: 37.460 |ONE WEEK OF DATA MISSING|

 Japan’s biggest publishers during October 2016 were:

1. Capcom: 246.400
2. Electronic Arts: 215.113
3. Bandai Namco: 203.009
4. Square Enix: 138.309
5. Nintendo: 130.334

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

Retail software sales per platform were:

1. PlayStation 4: 639.506
2. Nintendo 3DS: 597.649
3. PlayStation Vita: 371.265
4. Wii U: 105.394
5. PlayStation 3: 70.124
6. Xbox One: 3.921

There were 1.787.859 games sold during October, a mild drop from last month and also a slight increase from October 2015, this year’s Battlefield 1 and Monster Hunter Stories made up for God Eater: Resurrection, October 2015’s biggest game, though.

For the year so far nearly 21.3 million games have been sold, a drop of over 4.6 million from last year, drop is mainly due to the 3DS which is down by almost 4 million units and the PlayStation 3 with over 2 million units, the PlayStation 4 isn’t making up for the loss of PS3 software yet, even when its is up by over 60% YoY and rising; with Wii U also being down (by 50%) and the Vita back to positive results as it’s up by 4%, Vita could actually end the year positively on the software side.

Talking about Vita, it’s total retail software sales are now over 20 million units, big success for the handheld.

Slow month for software so moving onto hardware.

Japan’s hardware sales during October 2016 where

1. PlayStation 4: 120.860
2. New Nintendo 3DS XL: 61.696
3. PlayStation Vita: 37.299
4. Nintendo 2DS: 32.131
5. New Nintendo 3DS: 11.857
6. Wii U: 9.421
7. PlayStation 3: 2.041
8. Nintendo 3DS: 1.409
9. Xbox One: 1.382
10. Nintendo 3DS XL: 310

Hardware sales for the year so far at 3.3 million units a 600k drop YoY.

PlayStation 4 had a good performance for the month, a 30% drop from September with the new revision, seems like 30.000 units weekly will be its performance for the rest of the year, the system has also sold more than 1 million units for the year so far and should surpass it’s total sales for 2015 before the end of November so PS4 ends the year on a positive note on both hardware and software. PS4 also had a positive performance compared to last October where a 5.000 yen price cut came to effect.

On smaller hardware, the Nintendo 2DS also had a good drop, though sales are nowhere as high as the PS4, nothing to say regarding the other systems.

Revenue

Check last month’s post to see how this data is obtained.

Japan’s top grossing games of October 2016 were

1. [3DS] Monster Hunter Stories: ¥1.434.373.386
2. [PS4] Battlefield 1: ¥1.317.883.847
3. [PS4] Sword Art Online: Hollow Realization: ¥514.071.360
4. [PSV] Sword Art Online: Hollow Realization: ¥490.140.612
5. [PS4] World of Final Fantasy: ¥337.905.216
6. [PSV] World of Final Fantasy: ¥336.721.320
7. [PS4] BlazBlue: Central Fiction: ¥263.156.182 |ONE WEEK OF DATA MISSING|
8. [3DS] Mario Party: Star Rush: ¥261.633.524
9. [WIU] Paper Mario: Color Splash: ¥248.427.895
10. [PS4] Berserk and the Band of the Hawk: ¥244.936.224

The top grossing publishers were:

1. Electronic Arts: ¥1.685.608.471
2. Capcom: ¥1.434.373.386
3. Bandai Namco: ¥1.371.868.578
4. Square Enix: ¥885.797.318
5. Nintendo: ¥639.212.720

We’re missing a huge amount of data for this to be correct so it’s more like an educated guess, 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.

Bare minimum gross generated by software sales is ¥5.930.745.788 a 3 billion yen decrease from last month

It’s very interesting too look at these charts and then at the ones with units sold too look at the difference and just how much of a factor the price of the game is.

All of Electronic Arts’ games for the whole month combined sold less than Monster Hunter Stories, yet they generated more revenue as all were sold at a higher price. It becomes even more interesting when you see that Japan is a small market for EA games while Monster Hunter Stories is only sold in Japan and it is a big multimedia project only 1.4 billion yet might not be good for Capcom but 1.6 billion yen is probably more than what EA was even expecting.

On the revenue chart there’s also a new game, Berserk on PS4, which sold terribly, yet it managed to outgross Yo-kai Watch 3 by around 15 million yen, at launch a new copy of Berserk was sold for more than both SKUs of Yo-kai Watch 3 combined.

Berserk’s terrible results are probably worthy of their own blog post, maybe it’ll happen after a few weeks.

When looking at hardware revenue we have this:

1. PlayStation 4: ¥3.623.382.800
2. Nintendo 3DS: ¥1.800.214.205
3. PlayStation Vita: ¥707.935.020
4. Wii U: ¥305.240.400
5. PlayStation 3: ¥53.025.180
6. Xbox One: ¥32.189.480

If we were to group hardware and software revenue into ecosystems then we have this:

1. PlayStation: ¥8.691.597.489 ($84 million)
2. Nintendo: ¥3.728.945.904 ($36 million)
3. Xbox: ¥32.189.480 ($312 thousand)

Meaning that, at its minimum, during the month of October the Japanese videogame industry was worth around 12.4 billion yen, or $120 million.

Retro

Bestselling games of October 2006

1. [NDS] Pokémon Diamond / Pearl: 1.165.886
2. [PS2] Dragon Ball Z: Budokai Tenkaichi 2: 373.819
3. [NDS] New Super Mario Bros.: 141.639
4. [NDS] Zaidan Houjin Nippon Kanji Nouryoku Kentei Kyoukai Kounin: Kanken DS: 129.689
5. [NDS] Brain Age 2: More Training in Minutes a Day: 99.917

Biggest publishers

1. Pokémon Co: 1.165.886
2. Nintendo: 573.669
3. Namco Bandai: 535.689

Pokémon had just released on the monster that was the Nintendo DS and it was showing, New Super Mario Bros. and Brain Age 2 were both months old games but were still a top of the charts, it seems as if all people buying the system were also getting both games. DS was unstopabble on both hardware and software.

The next generation consoles were just about the corner as the PlayStation 3 and the Wii were about to launch so apart of the huge DS sales not much else happened.

Bestselling game of October 1996

1. [PS1] Arc The Lad II: 316.225
2. [SAT] Langrisser III Special Package: 154.474
3. [SAT] Lunar: The Silver Star: 144.939
4. [SAT] Sakura Wars: 104.248 

Biggest publishers

1. SCE: 373.009
2. Nintendo: 263.585
3. Capcom: 194.839

By winter 1996 the PlayStation had stablished itself as the dominant console for the generation and the two year old battle with Sega’s Saturn was finally over, sales of the Saturn started to drop right before the holidays  while the PlayStation’s kept rising and rising, after all, the biggest game ever was a few months away and you could only play it on PlayStation.

Nonetheless, Saturn software kept selling well thanks to a dedicated fanbase as the table above shows and there were still some big exclusives coming, though it won’t be the top system of the generation it could still enjoy a healthy life cycle, well, maybe if sales weren’t abysmal outside of Japan.

The Nintendo 64 on the other hand is a disaster, less than 10 games have been released on the system in 5 months and many third parties have no interest on the system, Squaresoft, one of the Super Famicom’s biggest developers isn’t supporting the system, in fact their biggest game yet is exclusive to PlayStation and it’s expected to sell up to one million consoles, Final Fantasy VII is a huge release.

Not all is lost for Nintendo though, their new handheld game, Pokémon is having incredible word of mouth and will likely hit one million total sales during the holidays, it’s also getting an animation starting next April so it could become even more popular. They’re also releasing a sequel to the Super Famicom’s most popular game for N64 right in time for the holidays, Mario Kart 64 could move some units, though there’s nothing else; Nintendo’s biggest holiday game, Donkey Kong Country 3 is actually coming to the Super Famicom.