Japan Monthly Report for December 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 December 4^th to December 31^st (4 weeks)

December was the biggest month of the year as it usually is, even if this was one week shorter than usual, Nintendo Switch’s first major holiday was the most noteworthy thing about it, even if it was a tad disappointing.

Over 58 billion yen in revenue came from December, comfortably making it the biggest month of the year, hardware being the main driver due to strong Nintendo Switch sales, for this holiday we had to depend on legacy software sales to drive revenue there as there weren’t any strong high-priced games to make up for Final Fantasy XV last December.

• Hardware: Around 40 billion yen worth of hardware were sold in December, Nintendo Switch once gain had the lion share of it doing 25 billion yen on itself and selling over 800k units, the biggest month its seen yet. The other systems saw a lackluster holiday all seeing drops, with both the 3DS and PS4 selling hundreds of thousands of units less than last December, but seeing how one is being phased out, and the other didn’t had last years lineup. All the negative months PS4 has seen since September means it ends 2017 essentially flat year on year.
• Software: Over 18 billion come from software, this December mostly depended on sales of older games as the ones released in December didn’t do the numbers typical December releases do. No highly priced releases doing huge numbers was also a bumber, even if Earth Defense Force 5 did very well.

Software

The best selling games of December 2017 were:

1. [SWI] Super Mario Odyssey – 455.904 (Around 2.7 billion in revenue)
2. [3DS] Pokémon Ultra Sun / Ultra Moon – 425.506 (Over 1.8 billion in revenue)
3. [3DS] Yo-kai Watch Busters 2: Hihou Legend Banbarayaa - Sword / Magnum – 396.464 (Over 2 billion in revenue)
4. [SWI] Splatoon 2 – 321.793 (Over 1.7 billion in revenue)
5. [SWI] Mario Kart 8 Deluxe – 295.910 (Over 1.6 billion in revenue)
6. [PS4] Earth Defense Force – 188.904 (Over 1.5 billion in revenue)
7. [PS4] Yakuza Kiwami 2 – 181.864 (Over 1.4 billion in revenue)
8. [3DS] Kirby: Battle Royale – 95.657 (Around 500 million in revenue)
9. [SWI] The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild – 94.415 (Over 600 million in revenue)
10. [SWI] 1 2 Switch – 55.640 (Over 200 million in revenue)

Strong Nintendo Switch sales, and bundles, put Mario on top once again outdoing Pokémon is impressive, as is all Switch games sold well in December, but the main bundle game was the strongest of all. Mario Odyssey is on track to becoming the bestselling 3D Mario title in Japan ever.

Pokémon also had a pretty decent second month, as is the game is performing better than anticipated after the disappointing sales of Sun / Moon, pretty good for what is the last major 3DS title, on the other hand Yo-kai Watch keeps its downward spiral, despite being released in the middle of the holidays total December sales of Busters 2 are yet to match first week sales of the first game.

As mentioned before PS4 had a rather weak holiday without large releases, but for what it is Earth Defense Force 5 outdid all expectations, best first week for the series and it’s on track on becoming the bestselling game as well, looking back a decade, it’s crazy that the EDF would outsell a flagship Yakuza title. Talking about Yakuza, Kiwami 2 keeps the series disappointing run on PS4 seeing the worst first week sales for a flagship title and the third worst for the series in general, with only the second PSP game and the HD Collection doing worse. Mind you the sales aren’t bad as is, but they’re considerably lower than what the franchise was on PS3. Yakuza’s issue wouldn’t be fixed by going multiplatform, but to attract a new audience is needed, maybe the brand-new title will fix things.

At the end of the Top 10 we see some games we haven’t seen for some time, 1 2 Switch returns for the first time since April while The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild since June, Zelda has typically just missed the top 10, and saw a very strong December, right now on Switch the game has sold over 750k units, over 900k adding the Wii U version, it’ll undoubtedly become the first million seller of the series in 20 years.

Close to 4.8 million games were sold in December, outdoing July and being the biggest month in units sold but not on revenue, it’s a very large drop from last December however, were around 6.6 million games were sold, but considering the launch line up, as well as the sales for legacy titles it can be seen why.

For the first time Nintendo Switch moved the most software at 1.8m, making 7.3m games sold for all of 2017, 3DS and PS4 were close at 1.2m and 1m, while everything else combined was just above 200k, revenue was also Switch’s at 8.4b while 3DS and PS4 were at 5.5b and 4.5b respectively.

Nintendo ends the year on top of the publisher side moving 1.6m games at 8.5b in revenue, Nintendo is head and shoulders above everyone else as after them go The Pokémon Company at less than 500k units, Level 5 at 420k, D3 at 188k and SEGA at 185k. For the year Nintendo also wins by a large margin moving around 8 million games, the closest to them are Square Enix at 4.5m games.

Hardware

Nintendo Switch ends the year on top as with every month since launch, now seeing its biggest month yet at 842k units sold. 3DS sees its worst holiday at 218k with the n2DSXL being the main SKU at 124k. PS4 also sees a disappointing, albeit not bad holiday at 281k with the PS4 Pro doing 88k the most its done since launch back in November 2016. Xbox One also saw its best month in ages, though barely noteworthy, outside of the main three platforms we see sales below 50k combined.

Noteworthy on revenue, all 3DS hardware revenue was over 30 billion for the year, Nintendo Switch did over 25 billion in December alone.