Japan Monthly Report for June 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 June was from June 4th to July 1st (4 weeks).

This year’s May was an unusual 5-week month which caused June to also be an unusual 4-week month, the first half of the year finally wraps up.

Once again Nintendo Switch was the big talk for the month selling the most software and hardware, out of the 16 billion yen generated on June around 8 billion came from Nintendo Switch, strong sales of Mario Tennis and lasting sales of a group of games that seem to be increasing are the cause of this, rising sales of the system itself are to thank to.

• Hardware: Roughly 9 billion of revenue came from hardware with more than half of it being on Nintendo Switch, since the release of the Splatoon 2 DLC sales of the system have slowly increased causing it to outsell the PS4 2:1. 
• Software: The additional 7 billion of revenue come from software of around 1.3 million games sold, still PS4 and Switch are most of it, for June Switch sold more and generated more revenue mainly due to the release of Mario Tennis Aces, while what was expected to be the big PS4 game of the month (and essentially the summer), New Gundam Versus, heavily underperformed.

Software

The best-selling games of June 2018 were:

1. [SWI] Mario Tennis Aces – 177.234 (Near 1.1 billion in revenue)
2. [PS4] Fate/Extella: The Umbral Star Link – 103.876 (Over 860 million in revenue)
3. [SWI] Minecraft: Nintendo Switch Edition – 96.940 (Around 360 million in revenue)
4. [SWI] Splatoon 2 – 75.041 (Over 410 million in revenue)
5. [PS4] New Gundam Breaker – 65.880 (Over 500 million in revenue)
6. [PSV] Fate/Extella: The Umbral Star Link – 51.073 (Over 300 million in revenue)
7. [SWI] Mario Kart 8 Deluxe – 49.619 (Around 275 million in revenue)
8. [SWI] The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild – 32.067 (Over 200 million in revenue)
9. [SWI] Super Mario Odyssey – 25.659 (Around 140 million in revenue)
10. [SWI] Kirby Star Allies – 23.559 (Over 130 million in revenue)

Mario Tennis Aces managed to pull up the series as it sold more than twice as much as Ultra Smash did on its first week and managed to outsell it by the second, the game also performed similar as did last June’s best-selling game, Arms. It’s hard to predict how well Aces will sell but 400k should be the bottom, the game has been very well received so it depends more on how the system is on sells through the summer. 

On another long await release we saw the retail version of Minecraft on Switch, the game came out digitally over a year ago and it’s been quite a while since Minecraft was regularly on sales charts, seeing how this is the first time Minecraft releases on a successful platform in Japan chances are it’ll be a top seller for a very long time, launch week sales were twice as high as the biggest previous launch, and after 2 weeks on sales it has sold around 1/3 of the total sales of the PS4 and Wii U versions at retail, the low price means Minecraft won’t mean much on revenue, but It’ll be a long seller.

On extreme disappointment we have New Gundam Breaker, first week of the game were the worst of the series, and by a big margin at that, the overwhelming negative reception by fans caused a terrible sell through and a quick price collapse, as of this writing there’s still 50k units left unsold and its at 50% off on retail, the game will have a hard time selling through them by December, particularly terrible as this was expected to be the biggest PS4 game for the summer, which just shows how dire the line up is for the season. With Gundam disappointing then Fate/Extella is the big PS4 release for the season, which itself didn’t have much noteworthy sales, they’re not bad of course, just nothing special.

On the older games, once again a special performance for Zelda as sales of it on June 2018 are flat compared to June 2017, it’s likely that the 2017 Zelda game will sell more on summer 2018 than summer 2017, sales of the game are at over 300k for the year so far, if it were to double them by the end of the year then the Switch version of Breath of the Wild would match sales of Ocarina of Time on Nintendo 64, it’s still a long road to become the best selling title of the series, but the game just keeps performance above expectations, sales of the game on its second year will by higher than total sales of more than half of the games on the series. Mario (in Kart and Odyssey form) keep doing well, as does Kirby; Donkey Kong however seems won’t be selling as long as expected, it was the best-selling title in May but failed to enter Top 10 in June, games already greatly outsold the Wii U release as its at 200k.

Starting this month, we’ll be including more data:

The best-selling games of 2018 so far:

1. [PS4] Monster Hunter: World – 1.945.146 (Around 17.5 billion yen in revenue)
2. [SWI] Splatoon 2 – 653.075 (Close to 3.7 billion yen in revenue)
3. [SWI] Kirby Star Allies – 542.313 (Over 3.2 billion in revenue)
4. [SWI] Mario Kart 8 Deluxe – 464.189 (Over 2.5 billion in revenue)
5. [SWI] Super Mario Odyssey – 396.324 (Over 2.3 billion in revenue)
6. [SWI] The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild – 300.179 (Around 1.8 billion in revenue)
7. [3DS] Pokémon Ultra Sun / Ultra Moon – 244.356 (1 billion yen in revenue)
8. [PS4] Jikkyou Powerful Pro Baseball 2018 – 219.117 (Over 1.7 billion yen in revenue)
9. [SWI] Mario + Rabbids: Kingdom Battle – 195.197 (Over 1.1 billion yen in revenue)
10. [SWI] Donkey Kong Country: Tropical Freeze – 183.342 (Over 1.1 billion in revenue)

Best selling games of the last 12 months

1. [SWI] Splatoon 2 – 2.405.171
2. [3DS] Pokémon Ultra Sun / Ultra Moon – 2.247.963
3. [PS4] Monster Hunter: World – 1.944.083
4. [3DS] Dragon Quest XI: Echoes of an Elusive Age – 1.763.948
5. [SWI] Super Mario Odyssey – 1.720.604
6. [PS4] Dragon Quest XI: Echoes of an Elusive Age – 1.353.432
7. [SWI] Mario Kart 8 Deluxe – 1.054.686
8. [SWI] Kirby Star Allies – 542.313
9. [SWI] The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild – 521.872

We have 16 titles that have grossed over 1 billion yen for the first half of 2018, their combined gross is of over 42 billion yen with Monster Hunter: World being around 1/3 of it.

Over 1.3 million games were sold for the month with Nintendo Switch being the most at 600k, PS4 was just 500k behind it. PSV and 3DS were close on software sales again with the former selling 100k and the latter being just 15k above it.

Nintendo is now the top publisher of the year by a large margin at 3.7 million games sold, they have a comfortable lead on revenue as well at 21 billion yen; Capcom is behind them at both at 2m and 17.8 billion respectively. For the month Nintendo moved 450k games, behind them were Marvelous at 155k due to Fate/Extella sales, then was Bandai Namco at 105k, Microsoft (an oddity in this chart) at 97k and Konami at 30k.

Hardware

Nintendo Switch stays on top of the hardware race selling 180k, more than the rest of the systems combined and twice as much as its closest competitor, sales for the system were flat compared to may as sales increased after the release of the Splatoon 2 DLC and Mario Tennis Aces while PS4 keeps on a more middling range and the old handhelds keep collapsing.

Switch sells 180k, PS4 sell 90k, 3DS 28k and Vita 12k.

Hardware and software will start being heavily down come July as there’s nothing to offset what was Dragon Quest XI and Splatoon 2 last summer, all systems have a weak release schedule until the last week of September, so a strong holiday will be needed to prevent a steep drop from 2017.