Japan Monthy Report for December 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, note that for sales data we'll use the one that's officially released while for revenue it'll be estimations.

For all intents and purposes the period we're calling December was from November 28th to January 1st (5 weeks).

The industry generated more than 58 billion yen in revenue during December, this was mainly due to the high sales of highly priced games such as Final Fantasy XV as well as strong sales of the PlayStation 4 family which were the top generators of revenue for software and hardware, respectively, during the month. Of course not all is thanks to them as strong sales of Nintendo 3DS software and hardware contributed a lot as well.

Breaking up revenue we have:

• Hardware: More than 29 billion yen in revenue for the month with more than 1.2 million units of hardware moved, on what is usually a Nintendo dominated holiday Sony managed to move more machines, as very strong sales of the PlayStation 4 family and the healthy PlayStation Vita moved more than 655k units, meanwhile with the Wii U done Nintendo essentially had only the 3DS and they ended up moving 593k units. Despite the difference in units being just 60k the PlayStation systems generated 8 billion yen more than the Nintendo systems thanks to the higher price of both PS4 and Vita over their competition.
• Software: The story is different here, much more software was moved by the Nintendo systems but the difference in revenue is relatively low. Packaged software sales amounted to more than 29 billion yen in December with just a 3 billion yen difference between the two as software of Nintendo systems amounted to more than 16 billion yen while PlayStation was more than 13 billion, nonetheless units sold tell a different story as 4.1 million units of software where moved on the Nintendo side while 2.4 million on the PlayStation side. The higher price of PlayStation software in comparison to Nintendo's is the cause to this as Final Fantasy XV (sold at 9.500 yen at launch) generated more than half of the total revenue of PlayStation software, other big sellers such as Yakuza 6: The Song of Life and The Last Guardian are to thank as well.

In comparison to December 2015 we saw a decrease of hardware sales, a 10% decrease from that month, this is mainly due to the collapse of Wii U sales which sold a meager 25.118 units this December compared to the 306.108 units sold on December 2015, as Nintendo is phasing out the troubled system this was to be expected however. Nintendo 3DS sales saw a mild drop from last December thanks to the new Nintendo 2DS model while the PlayStation 4 saw a tremendous increase, more than double, from 239.478 to 490.751, PS4 managed to offset the loss of Vita and PS3 sales.

Software sales, on the other hand, are almost flat with 6.7m sold last December to 6.5m sold this time, once again the fall is mainly due to the collapse of the Wii U which sold close to 1 million units of software last year to just 280k this December. Once again the PS4 makes up for most of the loss as the 3DS remained stable as well, just as with hardware sales of PS4 software doubled from last December, from 700k to almost 1.9m. It's worth noting, however, that December 2016 was the biggest ever month for sales of PlayStation 4 software as both Yakuza 6 and Final Fantasy XV alone amounted to more than 1 million units, compared to that to December 2015 where PS4's biggest game was Fallout 4.

Software

The best selling games in Japan during December 2016 were:

1.    [3DS] Pokémon Sun / Moon - 1.056.852 (More than ¥4.582.809.456)

2.    [PS4] Final Fantasy XV - 889.494 (More than  ¥7.969.093.596)

3.    [3DS] Super Mario Maker for Nintendo 3DS - 857.246 (More than ¥3.694.243.200)

4.    [3DS] Yo-Kai Watch 3: Sukiyaki - 568.768 (More than ¥2.723.093.016)

5.    [PS4] Yakuza 6: The Song of Life - 312.047 (More than ¥2.502.740.115)

6. [3DS] Momotaro Dentetsu 2017: Tachiagare Nippon!! - 245.682 (More than ¥1.181.071.950)

7.    [3DS] Miitopia - 133.225 (More than ¥566.387.006)

8.    [3DS] Yo-Kai Watch 3: Sushi / Tempura - 104.819 (More than ¥352.547.140)

9.    [PS4] The Last Guardian - 101.612 (More than ¥706.445.700)

10. [PS4] Watch Dogs 2 - 88.368 (More than ¥656.864.038)

Pokémon Sun / Moon kept the strong performance from November and became the best selling games of the month once more, for the time being the games are performing better than their predecessor, Pokémon X / Y, they may not be able to keep the pace though as launches aligned the comparison is about to get interesting, Sun / Moon launch in the middle of November to X / Y's October.

Next up Final Fantasy XV saw a huge drop for the franchise as expected, the game had the lowest first week out of the main series since Final Fantasy VI in 1994 and will become the series' worst selling game since 1990's Final Fantasy III, a little too many units shipped to stores as well as 1.1m units were shipped to stores for the first week and over a month later there are still thousands of them still there. Nonetheless on some positive aspects it became the best selling PS4 game the week it came out, it also had the second highest first week (revenue wise) of the year and was the top grossing game of the month.

Super Mario Maker on 3DS was the big shocker of the month as it performed well above expectations, in just one month the game nearly outsold the original Wii U version, shows that the game was halved due to the Wii U and how good it could do on a more viable platform, in the end it was Nintendo's best selling game of the year. Talking about Nintendo, their licensed game Momotaro Dentetsu 2017 also did very well, particularly so due to the long hiatus the franchise had, the Hudson, now Konami owned IP has a loyal fanbase and its interesting to theorize if Nintendo has plans for other series as well, finally, Miitopia also recovered from a weak launch and its doing very well, it's unlikely it'll reach Tomodachi Life levels, but it did well for what it was.

Sega's Yakuza 6 had the weakest first month for a mainline Yakuza title since the original game, this was expected however with more longtime franchise disappointments on PS4 this year, nonetheless the game did well and drastically improved Sega's software sales from last year, Yakuza at least is popular in the rest of Asia so it is making up for the loss of sales of Japan in other territories.

Level 5's Yo-kai Watch also on the charts as Sukiyaki also did better than expected, the game was actually supply constrained during the holidays (probably due to retailers being weary of the title after the massively over shipped Sushi/Tempura) but sold well anyway, Sushi / Tempura also return, mainly due to the release of the Dual Pack.

Finally, The Last Guardian finally released, and while it didn't set the charts on fire it did well for what it was. Ubisoft's Watch Dogs 2 is also the only western title on the list (not much else came out) and despite an also weak launch it improved its sales, it’s on track to outselling its predecessor on PS4.

A grand total of 6.584.375 games were sold during the month with 3DS taking 3.907.293 of those sales, PS4 software sales came in second with 1.883.536, then the Vita with 454.747, the Wii U with 279.747 and the PS3 and Xbox One which sold less than 60k combined. 

December amounted to almost 20% of total software sales for the year.

Nintendo came on top as the biggest publisher of the month with a huge 1.5m games sold, in revenue however they came out in second as their 6.7 billion yen came short of Square Enix's 8.5 billion yen even when they fell short of 1 million units sold. Big month for The Pokémon Company as well, almost all of their sales came from Sun / Moon as sales of Omega Ruby / Alpha Sapphire had died off before the game's release. Level 5 generated more than 3 billion on their own with their Yo-kai Watch titles and finally, Bandai Namco and Sony Computer/Interactive Entertainment finish off the list of big publishers for the month with just shy of a billion yen in revenue generated.

Hardware

As usual the Nintendo 3DS was the big system of the holidays with 568.466 units sold across all models and with 9.7 billion generated the system amounted to around 1/3 of the total hardware revenue of the month despite to amounting to 40% of total hardware sales.

The PlayStation 4 performed really well having its best month yet, with 490.751 units sold, the one week apart release of Final Fantasy XV and Yakuza 6 helped a lot as 200k units were sold in the span of two weeks due to the games, strong sales kept throughout the holiday which led to the positive result, more than 1.8m units sold for the whole year and a grand total of 4 million now, the system is even outpacing its predecessor at the moment. In revenue talk the higher price of the PS4 made it generate almost half of the total revenue of the month with more than 15 billion yen coming from PS4 hardware, fairly good month for PlayStation hardware as a whole as the Vita moved 161.326 units, a respectable amount for the troubled handheld in what is its last major holiday while the PS3 is saying goodbye with less than 5k units sold.

As mentioned before the Wii U saw a complete collapse and only sold 25.118 units, the system is already discontinued and it isn't readily available in stores, the Wii U goes with a whimper in the end.

On a side note (and this isn't counted into revenue at all) the Famicom Mini sold 248.000 units during December, 567.000 total units sold so far.

That's it for December, but we're not done with 2016 yet, there's still plenty of things to talk about, both good and bad.