Japan Monthly Report for May 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 monthly: 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 May was from May 1st to May 28th (4 weeks)

No sugarcoating it, May was a terrible month, the worst we’ve seen in over a year. As mentioned in the last entry Q2 2017 was to be a slow one, but when the biggest release of the month is a Vita port on the PS4 you can tell just how slow it was.

The industry generated some 12 billion yen of revenue in May, the worst month of the year. Revenue is coming from Nintendo now as sales of hardware and software on Nintendo amounted to some 8 billion yen, mostly due to hardware sales as the Nintendo Switch generated some 3.8 billion just on hardware. As mentioned last time the PS4 continued with negative results come May with steep drops on software sales and mild on hardware sales, this in turn has caused its year on year growth to dramatically slow down, Vita has also seen one of its worst months yet, so in short not a good month for PlayStation.

• Hardware: Hardware keeps being the main driver of revenue with some 8.5 billion coming from there, the Nintendo Switch stays ahead with some 3.5 billion in revenue and 127k units sold, after it goes the PS4, now back on top of the 3DS with some 82k units sold, just 2k more than the 3DS yet nearly twice as much in revenue though, as PS4 generated some 2.8 billion to 3DS’ 1.5 billion. Vita, Wii U, PS3 and Xbox One don’t amount to 30k units sold and less than 500 million in revenue. Hardware sales were at least higher than last year’s due to the Nintendo Switch as everything, bar the 3DS, is down compared to last May.
• Software: The lack of new releases has hurt software revenue as only 3.5 billion came from software, as mentioned multiple times in the past the sales of premium priced PS4 software has been the main drawer of revenue for the first quarter of the year, so without that we have this drop, 3DS software isn’t moving on large volumes to make up for that either. About 1.1 million games were sold for the month, with 3DS leading with 450k units (over a billion in revenue) behind it was the PS4 with 300k units (over 800 million in revenue) and the Nintendo Switch with 275k units sold yet over 1.3 billion in revenue, strong lasting sales of Mario Kart 8 Deluxe are to thank for the revenue as the game is still sold at full price. Vita, Wii U, PS3 and Xbox One amount to less than 130k units sold and less than 250 million in revenue.

Software

The bestselling games of May 2017 were:

1. [SWI] Mario Kart 8 Deluxe – 162.733 (Nearly 900 million in revenue)
2. [3DS] Monster Hunter XX – 61.400 (Over 300 million in revenue)
3. [3DS] Dragon Ball Heroes: Ultimate Mission X – 55.537 (Over 270 million in revenue)
4. [SWI] The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild – 39.856 (Over 250 million in revenue)
5. [PS4] Ys VIII: Lacrimosa of Dana – 30.764 (Over 220 million in revenue)
6. [3DS] Fire Emblem Echoes: Shadow of Valentia – 28.240 (Over 100 million in revenue)
7. [3DS] Pro Baseball Famista Climax – 19.315 (Nearly 100 million in revenue)
8. [SWI] Ultra Street Fighter II: The Final Challengers – 16.781 (Around 90 million in revenue)
9. [PS4] Nier: Automata – 16.712 (Over 100 million in revenue)
10. [3DS] Attack on Titan: Escape from Certain Death – 16.330 (Over 90 million in revenue)

Mario Kart 8 Deluxe managed to be on top of both April and May with a huge lead, it’s already the second best selling game of the year and the third on grossing, it also became the best-selling game on Nintendo Switch. Mario Kart is as strong as ever, even when it’s an enhanced port.

Monster Hunter, Dragon Ball and Zelda kept a decent performance. Not much else to say on that, Zelda crossed the 3 billion mark on gross, so I guess there’s that. On the other hand, Fire Emblem isn’t doing very well, it seems like it won’t be able to reach sales of previous remakes, considering the new-found popularity of the series, that is not a good outlook; Street Fighter didn’t do too hot either, but with that price it wasn’t going to happen, not a very good performance for Attack on Titan either.

Now onto the surprise hit of the year; Nier: Automata is back on Top 10, mainly due to how poor the month was but still, the game is keeping an incredible performance, it barely had a 10% drop compared to its sales on April and has now sold over 350k units, last month I also mentioned how it could outsell Yakuza 6 and Dragon Quest Heroes, well, it’s undoubtedly happening now, the game is on track of selling 400k units, and, unless some surprise announcement happens or Dynasty Warriors 9 outperforms, it’s going to become the second best selling PS4 game of the year, only behind Dragon Quest XI, the title just keeps surpassing expectations, expect it on Top 10 again in June.

As mentioned previously this was a bad month, and you can see it just by looking onto the Top 10, but it becomes clearer once looking at the bigger picture, as there was a 30% drop in sales compared to last May, the biggest hit took the PS4 which saw a huge May last year with Overwatch, Uncharted 4 and Dragon Quest Heroes II while it was essentially absent from this May, the system saw a 50% drop in sales from last May. The weak months of April and May severely slowed the year on year growth the system was seeing, we went from +37% year on year by the end of March to +12% by the end of May. June is a sparse month so it’ll likely keep dropping, though it should make up for the lost ground in July.

The 3DS sees the smallest drop with just -10% at 450k while the Vita and Wii U tie for the biggest, both at -70% selling 107k and 40k units respectively, many Vita games are selling small numbers as the best-selling Vita game of May was Minecraft, and it just sold 7k, so the remaining 100k are made up of several games selling very little.

Nintendo was the biggest publisher yet again, by a huge margin, they moved over 300k while nobody else moved even 100k, after Nintendo goes Capcom, Bandai Namco, Nihon Falcom and Square Enix. Falcom’s sales are only Ys VIII so you can guess just how low everyone else was. Nintendo is now the top grossing publisher too, at 12 billion, Capcom is right behind at 11.7 billion while nobody else is above the 10 billion mark.

Hardware

The Nintendo Switch stays on top with 127k units sold at 3.8 billion in revenue, the system is distancing itself from the Wii U launches aligned, now by 80k, though it is still suffering from shortages and sales could be much higher, after the Switch goes the PS4 with 82k units sold, 20k of them being Pro units, the system generated over 2.7 billion in revenue, just like in software the system is down compared to last May, though only by 10%. Similarly to the drop in software this has caused a drop in year on year growth, from +37% at the end of March to +23% at the end of May, the drop is not as severe as the one in software though, so people are buying PS4’s at near the same volume as Q1, just that now they must be purchasing mostly used games.

Nintendo 3DS sold 81k, from this, 2DS was 14k, New 3DS was 4.6k and New 3DS XL was 62k, 3DS is up from last May by around 10%, the system is still up year on year. Finally, Vita sold 19k, Wii U sold 1k, PS3 did 1.2k and finally Xbox One S did 368.

Performance in June should at least be flat compared to May’s, due to it being 5 weeks long alone, even then the performance of Tekken 7 should be better than any of May’s releases, with Arms being a potential surprise as well.