Japan Monthly Report for February 2018

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 February was from January 29th to February 25th (4 weeks)

Sales of Monster Hunter: World and PS4 momentum carried to February, making the month see a 30% increase compared to last year, Monster Hunter now carried the month as excitement for Nintendo Switch is dropping and other PS4 releases underperformed.

Over 27 billion yen in revenue were made in February, with hardware being the majority, Monster Hunter: World, which made some 3.6 billion in revenue represents roughly 30% of all software revenue.

• Hardware: About 15 billion yen come from hardware, with PS4 now being the lead platform in both revenue and units, doing more than the Nintendo Switch and Nintendo 3DS combined on both fronts, 2018 is a terrific year for PS4, and it’s only been 2 months.
• Software: Some 12 billion yen were software, a near 50% increase from last February and a 50% drop from January, sales of Monster Hunter: World carried most of the month as well as catalog Nintendo Switch sales, aside from that software sales were rather disappointing with expected big titles performing below expectations.

Software

The best-selling titles of February 2018 were:

1. [PS4] Monster Hunter: World – 478.691 (Over 3.6 billion in revenue)
2. [PS4] Dynasty Warriors 9 – 153.899 (Over 1.2 billion in revenue)
3. [PS4] Sword Art Online: Fatal Bullet – 104.408 (Over 850 million in revenue)
4. [PS4] Dragon Ball FighterZ – 83.161 (Near 600 million in revenue)
5. [SWI] Splatoon 2 – 82.137 (Near 500 million in revenue)
6. [SWI] Mario Kart 8 Deluxe – 68.278 (Near 400 million in revenue)
7. [SWI] The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild – 57.899 (Near 350 million in revenue)
8. [SWI] Super Mario Odyssey – 53.426 (Around 300 million in revenue)
9. [SWI] Mario + Rabbids: Kingdom Battle – 51.827 (Near 300 million in revenue)
10. [PS4] Girls und Panzer: Dream Tag Match – 39.825 (Near 350 million in revenue)

Monster Hunter momentum continued onto February selling nearly 500k additional units, the game is now at 1.8 million and retail, and could potentially be close to 3 million with digital, moving the series back to consoles by no mean damaged the brand, and that’s not even counting overseas sales were the game sits at over 7.5 million units shipped, making it the bestselling Capcom game worldwide.

Japan is still the biggest market for the series, but overseas sales are no longer a minority compared to it.

Apart from Monster Hunter there’s catalog Switch sales still doing pretty well, Zelda still showing in Top 10 a full 12 months after launch is very impressive, actively outselling Super Mario Odyssey is even more impressive, Mario + Rabbids also sees a strong second month, the game should have no trouble selling over 200k, it should become the best selling SRPG not Fire Emblem related Japan has seen in around decade, though that has mostly do to with the fact that aside from Fire Emblem there’s not much else, titles like Final Fantasy Tactics and Tactics Ogre have been MIA for a very long time.

Then we get to disappointing performances, Dynasty Warriors 9 saw continued decline, with 9 being the worst first week of the series since Dynasty Warriors 2 (the first proper musou game) and by no means will it reinvigorate the genre, it’s not even doing much better than NiOh, KT’s last February game. The other notable disappointment, didn’t even managed to enter Top 10, as Metal Gear Survive sold a measly 26k units seeing the worst first week sales for the series since Ac!d 2, and being among the worst of the series overall.

On more middling games we see Dragon Ball FighterZ, Sword Art Online and Girls und Panzer, which did around as well as expected, Dragon Ball sees middling sales, and will sell worse than the late port of Xenoverse 2 on Switch, but sales aren’t bad per se, the game wasn’t expected to do well as traditional fighters have fallen out of style in Japan, its performing pretty well compared to its contemporaries, like Street Fighter V or Tekken 7. Sword Art Online also did around what was expected, but the series still sees a large drop from predecessors, mainly due to the lack of a Vita version this time, but for a PS4 only release, it did fine. Finally Girls und Panzer did better than expected, but not wildly so, the game did very well appealing to its core base, but that base is niche in itself, so it did as well as it could.

Some 2.1 million games were sold in Japan for February, with PS4 being most of it at near 1.3 million sold, with less than half Switch is at 522k, its noteworthy to say that Switch is almost entirely catalog sales, as none of its February releases sold more than 30k (and there were less than a handful of them), 3DS is goes next with 217k units and then everything else combined amounts to less than 130k games sold.

Capcom stays as the top publisher for the year with some 500k games sold in January, Nintendo goes next at 420k, doing much better launches aligned to 2017, Nintendo should also become the top publisher of the year by the end of March in units sold, on revenue Capcom should hold the top for plenty of time, after them goes Bandai Namco, Koei Tecmo and Square Enix.

Hardware

As mentioned before PS4 was the top platform for the month, selling some 264k units (PS4 Pro being 48k of them), Nintendo Switch goes later at 172k units sold, seeing its worst month since June, when stock issues were at near its peak, comparatively speaking its just the worst month for the Nintendo Switch yet, while stock issues are still a thing, they’re no longer rampant, and the system isn’t really hard to get, overall excitement for it has just dropped after the holiday rush, and can’t be maintained by the system’s anemic release schedule and announcements, if anyone didn’t want the system for 2017 games, then 2018 games aren’t going to make a difference, specially considering that the biggest schedule Switch game for 2018 is a Kirby title that’s releasing mid-March. 3DS sells 43k, everything else combined is below 25k.