Japan Monthly Report for October 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 September was from October 2^nd to October 29^th (4 weeks)

This was a slow October right until the end, Mario made this a pretty big October, from what we’re used to at least as we start the holiday quarter.

Over 23 billion yen in revenue were generated on October, a small increase over September and a performance on par with January and about twice as much revenue as last October. Hardware moved the most revenue, but by a small margin over software, 12 billion to 11 billion, as with most previous months that’s mainly due to strong Nintendo Switch and PlayStation 4 sales. Mario saves the software side on both units and revenue, would’ve been a pretty lackluster month without it.

• Hardware: Over 12 million yen come from hardware with the Nintendo Switch again head and shoulders above competition, selling around 233k and doing around 7 billion in revenue, distant second being the PS4 at 111k and 3.7b in revenue and the 3DS sound 77k and 1.3b in revenue, everything else combined wasn’t noteworthy. Most revenue came from the last week of the month as the Nintendo Switch sold 133k at 4 billion in revenue during the launch of Super Mario Odyssey.
• Software: Speaking of Mario, he didn’t just save the hardware side from a mediocre launch, but the software one as well, from the 11 billion in revenue total Mario alone was around 3.5 billion, which in turn was over 60% of total Switch revenue. There’s actually an event split on units’ sales and revenue between the PS4 and Switch, both selling around 800k games and doing shy of 5 billion in revenue. The missing billion comes from 3DS software.

Software

The best-selling games of October 2017 were:

1. [SWI] Super Mario Odyssey – 511.625 (Around 3.5 billion in revenue)
2. [PS4] Gran Turismo Sport – 153.647 (Over a billion in revenue)
3. [PS4] Ark: Survival Evolved – 72.580 (Over 500 million in revenue)
4. [SWI] Splatoon 2 – 72.143 (Over 400 million in revenue)
5. [3DS] Shin Megami Tensei: Strange Journey Redux – 57.725 (Over 400 million in revenue)
6. [PS4] The Evil Within 2 – 53.976 (Around 450 million in revenue)
7. [PS4] Assassin's Creed: Origins – 53.176 (Below 500 million yen in revenue)
8. [3DS] Mario & Luigi: Superstar Saga + Bowser's Minions – 53.627 (Over 250 million in revenue)
9. [PS4] City Shrouded in Shadow – 52.724 (Over 450 million in revenue)
10. [SWI] Mario Kart 8 Deluxe – 51.152 (Over 250 million in revenue)

Super Mario Odyssey saw the biggest launch for a 3D Mario title and is the second biggest launch on Nintendo Switch yet, as with most things Switch Mario flew above expectations, one million is a lock.

Gran Turismo Sport on the other hand is the complete opposite as it saw the worst first week of the series to date, and has had an awful performance throughout so far. It’s crazy in retrospect how Horizon: Zero Dawn would handily outsell both Gran Turismo and Everybody’s Golf, as is Sony no longer has strong performers from their Japan studios, but at least their western studios keep doing well, I have high expectations for The Last of Us Part II.

Not much else to comment on, this month’s releases for the most part did alright, with The Evil Within 2 being the major exception, doing much worse than the original, similar scenario with Itadaki Street on both PS4 & PSV, though for those family friendly games legs matter more than anything.

This is the last change I’ll get to it so, Fire Emblem Warriors did terrible, awful launch and no legs, it wasn’t even among the 5 best-selling Switch games for the month.

As mentioned before both the PS4 and Switch moved about 800k games on October, with 3DS moving around 350. Sales of PS4 software for the year so far are at around 8 million, meaning it’ll surpass 2016’s totals before the holidays, even if the system isn’t getting much notable releases for the rest of the year.

On the publisher side Nintendo is on top again with 733k games sold and over 4.6 billion in revenue, as is they’ve sold around 5.5 million games in Japan for the year so far, doing some 30 billion in revenue. After Nintendo goes SIE, Square Enix, Bandai Namco and Spike Chunsoft none which sold more than 200k games, in October Nintendo moved more games than the rest of Japan combined.

Hardware

Nintendo Switch #1 once again with 233k units sold, followed by the PS4 at 111k, 25k of them being Pro units, PS4 is down YoY for the second month in a row after a positive year, and should stay down until January, totals for 2017 should at worse be flat YoY though.

3DS did some 77k, 41k being new 2DS, 30k being new 3DS XL, 6k 2DS and 900 new 3DS as is the new 2DS hasn’t done much for the 3DS, it rather feels unnecessary.