If you have been following sales in
Japan for the past few months or so you’ve probably heard of two trends,
Japanese games underperforming and western games overperforming, which is
largely true, while Final Fantasy XV will be the series worst selling game in
over 20 years, Battlefield 1 became the best-selling game in its series and has
so far sold more than the new entry on another Japan bound long running series,
Resident Evil 7: biohazard. 2015’s Call of Duty: Black Ops III is the series
best selling game when not combining rereleases and of the best selling first
person shooter games in Japan outselling staples like Dark Souls, Yakuza, Tales
of and even big Nintendo games, Black Ops III has sold more than the combined
sales of all Zelda titles on Wii U.
So, how did we get there, and from
there here? A short history lesson, and before that let’s define what a western
game is for this discussion.
I’ll define a western game, from a
Japanese point of view, as a game developed by a western developer made with
western audiences in mind and a game where sales in Japan can be considered
next to irrelevant.
The part about just being developed
by a western developer is important, and I’ll get to why in a minute.
For the late 80’s and early 90’s the
videogame industry was mostly dominated by Japanese companies, especially if
you didn’t play on PC. Nintendo, SEGA, Capcom, Konami, etc. Most big developers
and IPs were from Japan, especially on the Nintendo systems, where their
dominance in the home market meant nearly every developer were supporting their
platform, often exclusively, however, as SEGA couldn’t keep the same level of
success in Japan they had to turn to western developers to support their
console, here two big names show up, Electronic Arts and Midway, where their
support managed to make the SEGA Genesis outselling the Super Nintendo on
Europe and had nearly match sales of it in the Americas, if you were to look at
the bestselling games on the Genesis you’ll see that all, but games published
by SEGA themselves, were from the big western third parties, alongside Sonic
there was Mortal Kombat, NBA Jam and FIFA.
While EA and Midway saw big
successes on the Genesis they didn’t shy away from the Super Nintendo and released
most of their games on both consoles, made sense right, by the end of the
generation combined sales of the Genesis and SNES amounted to some 60 million
units between the Americas and Europe, there was no need to play favorites.
However, across the ocean there were
some additional 20 million consoles, and we saw very few attempts from western
developers to enter the market, why was that?
I can’t really give a good answer to
that as I’m not Japanese, but western companies found the Japanese market to be
very hard to get into with the majority of them outright ignoring it, the few western
games that made it to the Super Famicom or SEGA Megadrive came from Japanese
companies releasing it on behalf of their western counterparts a practice that continues
to this day, even when a game is a megahit internationally, like Grand Theft
Auto and Call of Duty, it needed a Japanese publisher to see the light in
Japan.
Anyhow, so which game qualifies as
the first big breakthrough in Japan, well, and I’m sort of cheating here,
that’d be Rare’s Donkey Kong Country.
Now, it’s true that Rare made a game
based on a Nintendo property and had Nintendo’s marketing muscle behind,
however it’s also worth noting that Donkey Kong was kind of forgotten by the
time Rare brought him back, they even redesign him, and while brand recognition
and good marketing can lead to success that not always works, else Final
Fantasy USA and Terranigma would’ve been huge successes. Rare’s game sold 3
million units in Japan becoming the second best selling game of 1994, behind
Square’s Final Fantasy VI and the fourth best selling game on the Super
Famicom, to prove that their game wasn’t a fluke Donkey Kong Country 2 & 3
were huge hits as well, both selling over a million units.
Rare was the most successful western
developer in Japan for the rest of the decade continuing their success (albeit
in a smaller scale) on the Nintendo 64, where Donkey Kong 64, Diddy Kong Racing
and the Banjo Kazooie games all sold well. At the same time though, all of
these games were similar to the big Nintendo games in the system, so while Rare
found success they were more or less doing the same thing Nintendo was doing as
when they tried different genres their games didn’t pull the same numbers as
both GoldenEye and Jet Force Gemini didn’t do well in Japan, the one outlier
here would be Perfect Dark which became the first FPS game to sell over 100.000
units in Japan and would remain the genre’s biggest game for nearly 8 years, so
at the very least Rare built a foundation but not much else as they moved to
the Xbox, though with the failure of the GameCube in Japan is unlikely they
would’ve done much better.
While Rare games were popular the
true success story from a western developer at the time was Naughty Dog’s Crash
Bandicoot. At the time of release the PlayStation was for the most part a more
“serious” console with not many kid friendly games, both Crash and Parappa,
released on the same day where the first games to change that trend, with the
release of Final Fantasy VII less than two months later and the widening appeal
of the PlayStation the games became popular. Despite a modest 60.000 opening
week Crash Bandicoot went on to sell over 800.000 units and its two sequels
sold more than a million units each. Despite some changes made to the games for
Japan, as to appeal to the wider Japanese audience, Crash Bandicoot was clearly
not Japanese and it didn’t stop it from being hugely successful, though this
didn’t translate to spin offs and Naughty Dog wouldn’t find success in Japan
until 2009 with Uncharted 2.
So, what about a western developer
that found success on its own, then we move to Electronic Arts, which is also
the only one who has published all of their own games (though they teamed up
with Japanese companies some time as Square and Victor, but still) the earliest
success from Electronic Arts comes in the way of their Theme Park games which
sold decently on the early years of the PlayStation and SEGA Saturn, however as
competitors showed up their sales drop, and as football wasn’t very popular in
Japan their FIFA games weren’t doing very well either, then comes the 1998
World Cup which happens to be the first time Japan participated and the
popularity of the sport skyrockets, EA japan sees the opportunity and releases
FIFA: World Cup 98 just in the for the competition, the game is a huge success
selling over 450.000 units and is to this day EA’s best selling game on the
region. Sadly, this is short lived, the interest doesn’t move to other EA
titles and worst of all Konami’s Winning Eleven series takes the spotlight form
FIFA, moving to the 2002 World Cup, which took place in Japan, where EA’s 2002
FIFA World Cup sold 143.000 units, compared to Winning Eleven 6 sold over
1.100.000 units, from then on Konami would eat sales of every other football
games for over a decade.
For the rest of the PS2 years EA
would see modest success at best with most of their games struggling to sell
50.000 units.
Talking about the PS2 years, that
time saw the rise of a little known property known as Grand Theft Auto, GTAIII
was a monster success in the Americas and Europe, selling millions of units,
however Take Two saw no interest on releasing the game in Japan, despite the
growing PS2 install base, it was up to a Japanese publisher and Capcom took the
opportunity, released almost 2 years after its English release Grand Theft Auto
III sold over 450.000 units in Japan, the next entry, Vice City, saw a huge
increase in sales, despite it coming out less than year later, with 600.000 units
and finally San Andreas saw a modest drop in sales at 550.000 units,
nonetheless GTA proved very popular in Japan, and very lucrative for Capcom as
their only other series to sell more than GTA during the generation were
Onimusha and Megaman: Battle Network, the success of Capcom and GTA in turn
inspired other Japanese publishers to try and localize some western games as
well, in particular Spike and Cyberfront with Konami, Sony and even Capcom
themselves trying some other titles out, with varying degrees of success, at
least Capcom more or less continued what Rare did as sales of western games
kept rising year after year, still a very small part of overall software sales
in Japan, but growth nonetheless.
That was a little longer than
expected, but we’re now at the start of the PS3 generation and where western
games truly took off, we’ll start looking back at the first full year of the
generation, 2007.
2007 saw the explosion of the Wii
and the nonstop rise of the Nintendo DS, for the first time in a while things
were going fine for Nintendo, at the same time there were problems for Sony as
the PS3 failed to take off, the PSP, while successful, wasn’t doing as great as
they’d hope, the PS2 was still doing really good and was the platform where
most western sales came from, moving some 750.000 units out of the 2.1 million western
games sold that year, the Capcom published Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas was
the best selling western game of the year with some 412.000 units sold, Capcom
themselves were the biggest publisher of western games, mostly due to sales of
GTA titles selling some 800.000 units, this year sales of western games
amounted to some 3% of overall software sales in the region.
Moving to 2008 we saw a growth in market
share despite a loss in sales, both small however, Grand Theft Auto IV was the
best western game of the year with some 195.000 units, the worst a GTA sold
since GTAIII. The PS3 doubled its sales of western game for the year selling
some 900.000 units, ¼ of its total software sales for the year. It’s worth
noting here that the Xbox 360 actually saw a healthy amount of sales coming
from western games, as it was the second largest platform for western games
behind the PS3, actually selling more western games than the Wii and Nintendo
DS combined, a trend that continued until 2012 (save for 2011) in other words
all the growth that western games have experienced over the past decade has
been almost without Nintendo’s involvement as their platforms continued to be unattractive
for western games during the whole generation, even for games where a Wii port
existed the publishers saw more lucrative results releasing the Xbox 360
version instead. The growth of western games in Japan comes from PlayStation
and Xbox.
By 2009 Call of Duty had become a
big deal in Japan, 2007’s Modern Warfare was a sleeper hit, selling over
100.000 units in 2008 and an additional 100.000 in 2009, much more considering
the second-hand market. 2008’s World at War wasn’t released in Japan so Modern
Warfare had nearly two years to build a fan base on its own. This made 2009’s
Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 the best selling western game of the year,
selling over 230.000 units, the game was also published by Square Enix who
would take publishing duties until 2015. The year was a huge increase from 2008
selling over 2.6 million games and increasing the market share to 4.1%, both
PS3 and Xbox 360 saw the lion share of sales as from the 2.6m 2m came from
those platforms with a near 2:1 split between them. Shooter and action games
proved to be the popular western genres as Uncharted 2, Killzone 2, Assassin’s
Creed II and even Gears of War 2 also pulled decent sales.
By 2010 Call of Duty kept getting
bigger as Black Ops sold over 300.000 units, by this time more and more western
publishers started to open in Japan publishing their games themselves, in
particular Take Two took back GTA from Capcom publishing Episodes from Liberty
City selling over 120.000 units with their new title, Red Dead Redemption, not too
far behind with 114.000 units, even Sony started to publish God of War by
themselves making God of War III the best selling game in the series with
100.000 units sold. Sales and market share also increased to 3.1m and 5%
respectively, this was due to the continues growth of PS3 western software, now
selling 1.8 million, meanwhile Xbox 360 started its decline with some 650.000
units with everything else not amounting to 600.000 units.
In 2011 Nintendo finally shows up as
Just Dance was the best-selling game of the year with 427.000 units sold,
despite Ubisoft publishing Assassin’s Creed in Japan they passed on Just Dance,
Nintendo took the chance and published the first two games, which were successful,
Nintendo also published the GoldenEye remake on Wii, which sold over 100.000
units handily outselling the original. Call of Duty also started to stabilize,
with Modern Warfare 3 selling over 300.000 units, still increasing but the
growth had started to slow down. Finally, a competitor to Call of Duty showed
up as EA’s Battlefield 3 sold over 180.000 units, sales of the Uncharted series
are also worth noting as they kept increasing, with Uncharted 3 selling
165.000. Sales of western games saw big increase this year with over 4.1
million units sold achieving its highest market share yet, with over 8%. The
PS3 kept seeing increase with over 2.5m units sold, behind it was still the
Xbox 360 with 600.000 units with the Wii selling some 50.000 units less, most
of it being Just Dance.
2012 saw the return of Call of Duty
on top as Just Dance’s popularity was short lived as in 2012 Just Dance 2 sold
less than the first one, Black Ops II on the other hand was the biggest game
yet selling over 400.000 units, worth noting is also the performance of The
Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim that sold over 100.000 units. This year also saw a big
drop compared to 2011 as total sales dropped to 3.2 million with market share
dropping to 6.3%, PS3 took the biggest hit as it dropped to 1.8 million with
Wii behind it with less than 470.000 units. Despite taking over Japan, sales of
western 3DS software aren’t even 1% of total western sales.
The biggest game yet came out during
2013 as Grand Theft Auto V sold over 630.000 units becoming the best selling
game to be both published and developed by a western company, during 2013 we
also saw the rise of Battlefield 4 which sold over 200.000 units, as well as
the drop of Call of Duty as Ghosts only sold 350.000 units, total sales saw a
slight drop to 3.1 million, but with a slight increase of market share to 6.4%,
while PS3 sales saw an increase thanks to GTA V everything else dropped, out of
the 3.1m sold 2.5m was just PS3 software.
In 2014 we saw the console that
would replace the PS3 as the big seller of western software, without much else
of an option the PS4 showed up and all the best selling western software was on
it, Call of Duty remain on top with Advance Warfare, but kept seeing a drop
with less than 270.000 units sold, 2013’s best seller, GTAV saw good sales on
2014 with over 230.000 sold, not only did the PS3 version sold well over time,
but the new PS4 version also sold well, and would do so for the following
years, worth noting too is the performance of Destiny, the Sony published title
sold over 220.000 units. Though we saw a large drop, to 2.2 million units, it
was a transitional year, so it was to be expected, nonetheless the drop-in market
share was low, with just 6.1% PS4 showed itself as an available platform for
western games right of the bat with nearly 1.1 million coming from it, PS3 was
behind it with 900.000 units, with Xbox now a non-factor and Nintendo never
really being a factor western sales would exclusively come from PlayStation.
During 2015 Call of Duty stopped its
drop as Black Ops III sold over 310.000 units, the now Sony published series,
2015 also saw many other western series see their best-selling entries. Star
Wars: Battlefront sold over 162.000 units becoming the best-selling Star Wars
game, Fallout 4 sold over 150.000 units, nearly outselling Fallout 3 & New
Vegas combined, The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt sold 145.000 units when its
predecessor couldn’t sell 10.000, even GTA kept a strong performance, selling
over 200.000 units. PS4 saw an increase from 2015 moving 1.4 million units out
of the 1.8 million unit’s western games sold, keeping the decline, though
actually a super small increase in market share.
Finally, we’re at 2016 were PS4 is
essentially the only platform where western games release, from the 1.9 million
sold last year, 1.9m comes from PS4, at this point the other platforms are
margins of error. EA’s Battlefield 1 was the best selling game of the year with
233.000 units sold, behind it was Uncharted 4 selling nearly 180.000 units,
becoming the best selling game in the series, the though FPS competition from EA
further accelerated Call of Duty’s decline as it sold a measly 160.000 units,
other noteworthy performances come from Tom Clancy’s The Division, Overwatch,
Tom Clancy’s Rainbow Six: Siege and once again Grand Theft Auto V all selling
over 100.000 units, market share reaches its highest since 2011 at 7% a large
increase from 2015.
That brings us to the present where
western releases are selling on par or even better than the big Japanese games,
at the time of this writing Sony’s Horizon: Zero Dawn sold over 100.000 units
on its opening week and Tom Clancy’s Ghost Recon: Wildlands expected to do very
well too.
Let’s finish this piece with some
stats.
The all time best selling western
games in Japan, all rereleases combined on all systems.
01. Minecraft (PSV, WIU, PS4, PS3) -
2.602.533
02. Grand Theft Auto V (PS3, PS4,
360) - 1.363.233
03. Call of Duty: Black Ops II (PS3,
360, WIU) - 633.361
04. Grand Theft Auto: Vice City
(PS2, XBX) - 611.960
05. Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2
(PS3, 360) - 592.717
06. Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas
(PS2, XBX) - 567.647
07. Battlefield 4 (PS4, PS3, 360) -
563.458
08. Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3
(PS3, 360) - 556.769
09. Call of Duty: Black Ops (PS3,
360) - 549.503
10. Grand Theft Auto IV (PS3, 360) -
485.052
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