Japan Monthly Report for June 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 28th to July 2nd (5 weeks)

Finally, Q2 2017 is over, and boy was it awful, after an explosive Q1 that put 2017 above 2016 we’re now barely above or below the previous year. Thankfully the upcoming months will make up for it.

The industry generated over 15 billion yen in revenue in June, putting it a bit behind February and making it the second worst month of the year, most revenue comes from Nintendo, but the difference isn’t quite as large as in previous months, mainly due to PS4 keeping steady sales, even in lack of new releases, combined with faltering sales of the 3DS and barely stable sales of Switch, Nintendo generates 9 billion to PlayStation’s 6.4 billion.

• Hardware: Its revenue amounts to some 10.6 billion, being most of the revenue once again, just like that the Nintendo Switch is on top once again selling 154k units with 4.6 billion yen in revenue, PS4 isn’t too far behind though as the system further distanced itself from the 3DS, PS4 sold 121k units making over 4 billion in revenue, while the 3DS did 77k and less than 1/3 of the revenue, PSV, Wii U, PS3 and Xbox One sold less than 50k doing less than 500 million in revenue.
• Software: While not huge releases, June’s where much bigger than May’s making up for around 5 billion in revenue, split between Nintendo and PlayStation isn’t large very large, Nintendo did 3 billion, PlayStation just one billion behind, split un units sold is just 4:3 too. PlayStation 4 sold the most software but stood behind Nintendo Switch in revenue, just by 400 million, steady strong sales of Mario Kart, Zelda and newcomer Arms caused this. Nintendo 3DS sold over 400k games, around 900 million in revenue, some 600 million behind PS4. PSV, Wii U, PS3 and Xbox One software is less than 200k and below 400 million in revenue.

Software

The bestselling games of June 2017 where:

1. [SWI] Arms – 171.463 (Over a billion yen in revenue)
2. [PS4] Tekken 7 – 81.003 (Over 660 million in revenue)
3. [SWI] Mario Kart 8 Deluxe – 70.275 (Over 370 million in revenue)
4. [SWI] Seiken Densetsu Collection – 41.128 (Over 210 million in revenue) |ONE WEEK OF DATA MISSING|
5. [3DS] The Alliance Alive – 38.799 (Over 260 million in revenue)
6. [3DS] Monster Hunter XX – 38.777 (Nearly 200 million in revenue)
7. [SWI] The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild – 32.769 (Over 200 million in revenue)
8. [PS4] Final Fantasy XIV: Stormblood – 29.328 (Over 120 million in revenue) |ONE WEEK OF DATA MISSING|
9. [PS4] Ys VIII: Lacrimosa of Dana – 23.160 (Over 130 million in revenue)
10. [3DS] Radiant Historia: Perfect Chronology – 21.429 (Around 150 million in revenue)

Arms is off to a great start, grossing over a billion yen being the 13^th confirmed game to do so, it’s also the first time a brand-new IP is the best-selling game of the month since the launch of the original Splatoon back in May 2015. Given the Switch stock situation and current install base makes it further impressive, how high can it go will entirely depend on how the hardware is stocked, so far, the game is doing well on legs and was well received, depending on how it keeps being updated, could sell over 500k. First week sales of Arms were also higher than of any non-licensed fighting game since the launch of Tekken 6 back in 2009, and the best for any fighter since Smash Bros. on Wii U on December 2014.

Speaking of Tekken, we see a very different performance, while Arms is doing better than any fighters in recent memory, Tekken 7 is doing worse than the franchise has ever done, at its current pace the game won’t even match first week sales of Tekken 6, maybe even not Street Fighter V. This is no isolated incident however, all traditional fighters are on an all-time low, and that’s not changing anytime soon.

Mario Kart, Zelda and Monster Hunter kept a decent performance, both Zelda and Mario Kart surpassing the 500k mark, Mario Kart also above 3 billion yen in gross, even Ys VIII is doing well, the best a game from Vita has done on PS4, that version won’t end up too far in the end, potentially the most successful game in the series.

Alliance Alive also had a good start, poor word of mouth of FuRyu’s last 3DS RPG, The Legend of Legacy, hurt at start, but this time the game has been well received and had a great second week drop. It won’t latch LoL, but it should become FuRyu’s second most successful title, a well-executed sequel could do even better. On the other 3DS RPG, Radiant Historia had a decent first week, close to the original, but won’t come close to match it, remaining a late DS game so late into the 3DS life probably wasn’t a very good idea.

Talking about games outside Top 10 for a bit, and we’re back with Nier: Automata, it sold just shy of 20k for the month, more than in April and May, total sales now over 380k, on other PS4 news GTAV has sold over 100k for the year so far and surpassed 500k sales total, becoming the fourth PS4 game to do so, Minecraft beat it to by a couple of weeks, and they’re now the 2^nd and 3^rd best selling games on the system respectively, sales of Minecraft continue strong as it sold around 30k on all systems, Minecraft isn’t slowing down anytime soon, not with the retail Switch version coming. Performance of Farpoint is also commendable, especially for VR only title, the game is having good week on week drops, seems like PSVR owners want something to play.

As mentioned before PS4 sold over 440k units of software being on top of anyone else, after it was the 3DS with just 400k about half of what it did last June, not surprising though due to the lack of new releases, last June saw Story of Seasons and Ace Attorney 6 to The Alliance Alive, overall 3DS is still on top though, with over 5 million games sold for the year so far, most impressive sales are still up YoY, as are PS4’s. Switch goes behind them with 365k units, software sales of Switch are slow down due to lack of new releases and stock issues on hardware. PSV sells 148k, Wii U 35k, PS3 16k and Xbox One 2k.

Nintendo stays as the top publisher for the month with over 319k games sold making over 1.8 billion yen, behind them go Bandai Banco, Square Enix and FuRyu. For the whole year Nintendo makes more than 14 billion yen in revenue, 2 billion above Capcom, sales of Square Enix titles for the year so far now above 1 million, that figure will at least triple by the end of July.

Hardware

Nintendo Switch stays on top for its fourth month, selling over 154k, a 25% increase over May, behind it goes the PS4 with 121k units, 29k of those being Pro units, sales of the high-end SKU have been greatly increasing the past few months, it might sell more than the Vita for the whole year, PS4 sees a mild increase over last June, less than 20%

3DS is now down YoY, if just for a bit, should make up for it with the New 2DS XL, but sales have slowed down noticeably, the system sold just 77k units, 4k of them being New 3DS, 60k being New 3DS XL and 13k being 2DS, the system sees a 30% drop compared to last month.

PSV sells 21k, PS3 1.5k, Wii U 815 and Xbox One 444.

Q2 was so bad that all months combined generated less revenue than March alone, thankfully the upcoming months should do much better.