Japan Monthy Report for January 2017

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 Janaury was from January 2nd to January 29th (4 weeks)

The industry generated over 21 billion yen for the whole month, the year starts stron for the PlayStation brand, mainly the PlayStation 4, as the whole brand generated over 14 billion yen with PS4 hardware and software having the lionshare of it. The continued strong performance of PS4 hardware as well as sales of premium priced software such as Kingdom Hearts HD II.8 and Resident Evil 7: biohazard are to thank for this, as well as good performance from lasting 3DS titles such as Pokémon Sun / Moon and Super Mario Maker for Nintendo 3DS.

Breaking up revenue we have:

• Hardware: More than 10 billion yen worth of revenue came from hardware this month, with 473k units moved across all consoles, the PlayStation 4 starts the year strong, up nearly 80% from last January with 219k units sold, a string of strong releases carried the system for the month and should keep going fine moving forward, PS4 ammounts to 60% of total hardware revenue as the high price of the system as well as high sales ammount to a lot, later comes the 3DS family which is nearly flat YoY with 174k units sold, the year starts on a neutral note thangs to these systems as we're nearly flat YoY, PS3, PSV and Wii U are all heavily down, thankfully the PS4 is finally making up for loses, Wii U in particular sinks below the 1.000 unit mark on weekly sales and had its worst month yet with less than 7.000 units sold, it's already discontinued, so its not as if it wasn't unexpected.
• Software: Similar to hardware, software revenue ammounts to over 10 billion yen for the whole month with over 2.5 million games sold, a slight 3% increase YoY, the increase is thanks to better sales from last year's titles compared to last year on nearly all systems, particularly 3DS where Pokémon Sun / Moon and Mario Maker saw better holds and sold more units than Monster Hunter Generations last January, this along with strong PS4 sales thanks to Resident Evil 7 and Kingdom Hearts II.8, which handily out did last year's Dragon Quest Builders and Yakuza: Kiwami managed to offset the decline on PlayStation Vita and mainly Wii U software sales which saw a 29% and 69% drop respectively.

The main thing preventing mostly wide positive results are the collapse of the Wii U that saw huge decreases on both fronts from 57k units sold and 295k games sold last January to 7k and 100k this year, as the 3DS and PS4 go from flat to huge increases that are mostly making up for loses on PSV and PS3 Wii U is the one lagging far behind, this is easier to see as January 2017 was a much bigger month in terms of releases for all consoles, from Danganrompa V3 to Kingdom Hearts, Poochy & Yoshi and Resident Evil, all systems but Wii U got bigger games than last year, even if they're down YoY in terms of sales.

Software

The best selling games of January 2017 were:

01. [PS4] Resident Evil 7: biohazard - 231.188 (Over 2 billion yen in revenue)

02. [3DS] Pokémoon Sun / Moon - 216.170 (Over 900 million yen in revenue)

03. [3DS] Super Mario Maker for Nintendo 3DS - 187.614 (Over 730 million yen in revenue)

04. [3DS] Kingdom Hearts HD II.8 Final Chapter Prologue - 167.688 (Over 1.1 billion yen in revenue)

05. [3DS] Momotaro Dentetsu 2017: Tachiagare Nippon!! - 118.657 (Around 500 million yen in revenue)

06. [PSV] Danganronpa V3: Killing Harmony - 101.517 (Nearly 700 million yen in revenue)

07. [PS4] Gravity Rush 2 - 85.813 (Over 600 million yen in revenue)

08. [3DS] Poochy & Yoshi's Woolly World - 72.899 (Over 350 million yen in revenue)

09. [3DS] Yo-kai Watch 3: Sukiyaki - 66.750 (Over 250 million yen in revenue)

10. [PS4] Danganronpa V3: Killing Harmony - 57.338 (Nearly 450 millon yen in revenue)

Despite doing below expectations Resident Evil 7 was the best selling game of the month at 231k units sold with just one week, the split between the uncensored grotesque and the standard version is unknown, but likely around around 70% and 30% respectively, with the Xbox One version selling less than 2.000 units; first week shipment for the game was that of 377.000 units and unless good WoM kicks in its going to have a hard time selling through them any time soon, yet another big PS4 overshipped. At the same time 7 sees the series worst first week since the launch of Resident Evil 4 on the GameCube in January 2005 and the worst launch of the main series on PlayStation consoles since the original game in March 1996.

Kingdom Hearts HD II.8 on the other hand did much better than expected having a higher opening week than any of the collections on PS3, the game had a 150.000 first week shipment and had no problem selling through it, a good sign for future Kingdom Hearts games on the system, keeping the topic on PS4, Gravity Rush 2 also did alright, it'll have no problem outselling the original release of the first game as it shipped 115.000 units on launch week, and while it'll take some time to sell through it, it should be able to do it, though it'll take some time, for 5 years in development and launching on a much bigger install base its not that great, but this more or less a passion project, doubt Sony had high expectations. Not all is rossy on the PS4 as Valkyria Revolution bombed with just 50k units sold on PS4 and about half of that on Vita seeing the series all time worst debut of the series.

Looking at the big PS4 sellers of December, neither showed legs as expected, December's 2nd best selling game wouldn't enter Top 10 in January as Final Fantasy XV sold only 44k, with Yakuza 6 doing much worse at 24k units.

3DS software also starts well with positive results for Pokémon and Mario, there's not much to compare to last year, but Poochy and Yoshi did better than last year's Wii U port, Hyrule Warriors: Legends and unlike that one, the 3DS game should be able to outsell the Wii U original. On the other handheld Danganronpa had a good start for Vita but without much else sales are down, nonetheless Danganronpa V3 saw the highest opening week for the series on Vita alone and show that there's still a sizeable audience on the system, not much else coming out on the following months however.

Minecraft's performance is worth noting, despite being nearly 2 years old the Vita game is just down 10% YoY and when including the other versions Minecraft is somehow actually up YoY, believe it or not.

Nintendo starts the year on a positive note with 555k units sold, behind are Capcom at 234k, Square Enix at 217k, the Pokémon Company at 216k and Spike Chunsoft at 158k.

Hardware

The PlayStation 4 starts strong with 219.276 units sold, from it some 30k comes from the Pro which has only been selling more and more each week as stock is more available, 3DS comes in second with some 174.188 between all SKUs with the New Nintendo 3DS XL selling the most as usual, after 6 years the original Nintendo 3DS and Nintendo 3DS XL models are no longer tracked, but they weren't pulling many units anyway, PS4 is up YoY by a lot while the 3DS is nearly flat. After that comes the negative results with the Vita at 69.913, well below it then the Wii U at 6.932 and well further down the PS3 at 1.897 and then Xbox One at 1.541, with the further collapsing sales of the PS3 and the Wii U it's likely we'll see Xbox One as the second best selling console of Japan for a very brief momment.

It's been long since high priced hardware has been selling as well as the PS4 which is driving up revenue, or more precisely, making up for the loss one of 3DS, with the upcoming Nintendo Switch 2017 should stop the trend of lowering expending we've seen the past few years.

2017 off to a good start.