Japan Monthly Report for December 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 GSD 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 December was from December 3rd to December 30th (4 weeks).

This December was the best month we’ve seen in a long-time, a very strong performance for Nintendo Switch and its software made for the best holiday in 3 years while an aggressive sales campaign on PS4 with strong sales of new high-priced games and lasting sales of older games made for an excellent month.

The negative streak of the year was broken as December 2018 outdid December 2017 in revenue, being the first positive result since May, even if the year still falls below 2017 overall it wasn’t as bad as previously expected.

• Hardware: Over 40 billion yen in revenue came from hardware, with it alone being higher than overall revenue of any other month of the year but January. Nintendo Switch selling the most hardware sold in a single month since the 3DS did in holiday 2012 and its high price are the reasons for this, Switch revenue represents 75% of all hardware revenue for the month and 70% of units sold. PS4 is well behind it, and despite selling slightly more than last December its revenue is down.
• Software: Over 33 billion yen came from retail software, being the strongest December in terms of releases we’ve seen in a sometime. With the year’s best-selling title, Super Smash Bros. Ultimate releasing on it, other high priced titles such as Dragon Quest Builders 2 and Judgement with strong sales and plenty of great sales from older software it was an excellent month for software, Switch has also the lion share here with 80% of the revenue and 75% of units sold.

Software

The best-selling games of December 2018 were:

1. [SWI] Super Smash Bros. Ultimate – 2.360.655 (Over 17 billion in revenue)
2. [SWI] Super Mario Party – 376.643 (Around 2 billion in revenue)
3. [SWI] Pokémon: Let's Go Pikachu! / Let's Go Eevee! – 357.479 (Around 2 billion in revenue)
4. [PS4] Judgment – 224.048 (Around 1.9 billion in revenue)
5. [PS4] God Eater 3 – 174.834 (Over 1.4 billion in revenue)
6. [SWI] Dragon Quest Builders 2 - 165.418 (Over 1.3 billion in revenue)
7. [PS4] Dragon Quest Builders 2 – 163.882 (Over 1.3 billion in revenue)
8. [SWI] Mario Kart 8 Deluxe – 151.734 (Around 800 million in revenue)
9. [SWI] Minecraft: Nintendo Switch Edition – 133.589 (Over 400 million in revenue)
10. [SWI] Splatoon 2 – 116.911 (Over 600 million in revenue)

In 4 weeks Super Smash Bros. Ultimate managed to outsell Monster Hunter: World and became the best selling retail title for the year, the game had the biggest launch for a Nintendo Switch title yet, the best for the series, and the second best of the year after the aforementioned Monster Hunter, as of this writing the game is the best selling title at retail and most likely the series’ bestselling title, outdoing 3 years’ worth of sales of Super Smash Bros. for Nintendo 3DS in just a month.

Sales of Nintendo Switch titles keep being very impressive, another one on the list being Super Mario Party, which tripled its sales from November and even sold more than what it did on its launch month of October, the game is the best selling title in the series’ since 2007’s Mario Party 8 on the Wii, at 900k sales the game is tied with Mario Party 4 as the 4^th best selling title in the series and should become yet another Switch million seller soon.

Speaking on million sellers, Minecraft on Switch is also in its way there, the game also surpassed 900k total sales this month, at this point it’ll be interesting to see which one gets to a million first, this or Mario Party, Minecraft on Switch will become the first third party million seller on Switch, and the first one for Microsoft in Japan.

On the final note for new Switch hardware, and moving the discussion to PS4, Dragon Quest Builders 2 became the first third party title of note to sell more than the PS4 version, the difference is minimal of course, and chances are that the game did better digitally on PlayStation, but it’s a good result, the game itself saw a notable decline from the first one, but its par for the course for an Omega Force sequel, it should still do well for Square Enix as both versions are very expensive, but neither will be reaching the sales the original had on PlayStation Vita.

Yakuza has seen a rough generation in Japan, with the lowest sales of the series, all titles in the series seeing underwhelming sales on PS4 compared to what they were pulling on PS3, for what its worth the series is finally gaining popularity in the west to offset loss of sales domestically. Judgement is not really a Yakuza title, but it’s a very similar title from the Yakuza studio and it had a fantastic debut, it has already outsold all Yakuza titles on PS4 except for Yakuza 6, the game will be fully dubbed in its localization so they’re betting a lot on it, this bodes well for the brand new Yakuza title.

And on the only proper disappointment for the month there’s God Eater 3, which saw the weakest launch for the series in Japan, debuting below Resurrection and its on track to barely sell on par with it despite enhanced holiday legs, it’s a very disappointing performance for the series when seeing the numbers Monster Hunter pulled months earlier.

On older titles the lasting sales of Mario Kart 8 Deluxe continue to impress, the enhanced Wii U port has not only nearly outsold the original by 1 million units, but its starting to outpace Mario Kart 7 on 3DS launches aligned, the game managed to outsell Super Mario Odyssey, so it won’t be a surprise if it also manages to outdo Super Smash Bros. Ultimate, even more impressively on yearly sales the game sees a drop of just 20%, despite selling over a million units last year.

Last December’s best-selling title, Super Mario Odyssey, just misses top 10, the game is at #11 with 55k units sold, it has already sold over 2m units and its on track of surpassing Super Mario 3D Land to become the bestselling 3D Mario platformer.

The best-selling games of 2018 were:

1. [SWI] Super Smash Bros. Ultimate – 2.360.655 (Over 17 billion in revenue)
2. [PS4] Monster Hunter: World – 1.959.188 (Over 17.5 billion in revenue)
3. [SWI] Pokémon: Let's Go Pikachu! / Let's Go Eevee! – 1.253.677 (Over 7.5 billion in revenue)
4. [SWI] Splatoon 2 – 1.122.324 (Over 6.2 billion in revenue)
5. [SWI] Mario Kart 8 Deluxe – 926.553 (Over 5 billion in revenue)
6. [SWI] Super Mario Party – 764.853 (Over 4 billion in revenue)
7. [SWI] Kirby Star Allies – 664.815 (Over 3.8 billion in revenue)
8. [SWI] Super Mario Odyssey – 575.926 (Over 3.2 billion in revenue)
9. [SWI] Minecraft: Nintendo Switch Edition – 525.045 (Around 1.8 billion in revenue)
10. [SWI] The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild – 491.648 (Around 3 billion in revenue)

This was the best month for retail software in 2 years, with 5.6 million games sold it’s the best month since December 2016, Nintendo Switch sold 4.3m of that, more than doubling sales of last December, seeing its strongest month for software sales yet, at about ¼ of the software sales of Switch were those of PS4, which are down in comparison to last December despite the system selling more, a higher install base and stronger releases, chances are holiday deal they had affected software sales negatively, still overall PS4 software sales saw an increase in comparison to 2017, chances are the system peaked in software sales this year. 3DS also saw, an expected, large decline, selling around 1/3 of what PS4 did and dropping 70% compared to last year. 3DS is effectively finished, so all of this was expected.

 

Nintendo ends the year as the biggest publisher of the month and of the whole year, both with huge margins over the second largest, at over 3.2 million games sold in December Nintendo sold more games in December alone than any other publisher sold in the whole year. Well behind Nintendo are The Pokémon Company and Square Enix each at over 380k units sold, Bandai Namco at 300k and Sega at over 230k.

Nintendo sold over 9 million games in 2018, over 4 times as much as Capcom, the second largest publisher and represents close to 1/3 of all retail games sold in Japan in 2018, sales of the top 10 publishers for the year represent roughly 2/3 of all retail software sales for the year.

Hardware

For 10 months in a row Nintendo Switch has been the best selling system, by selling over 1m million units this December it sold the most any platform has sold in a single month since sales of the Nintendo 3DS during December 2012 and saw the biggest month any system in its price range has seen, outdoing even the best months the PlayStation, PlayStation 2 and the Wii had ever did. The system is still performing below the previous Nintendo handhelds, but seeing how launches aligned its twice as expensive as the Nintendo DS & 3DS and 3 times as expensive as the GameBoy Advance it’s doing excellent, price is the only thing stopping Switch at this point and it’ll be interesting too see what happens once the console becomes more affordable.

Sony also had a very aggressive holiday campaign on PS4, much more than any we’ve seen in previous years, internationally its not uncommon to see limited deals run through the holidays, like the $199 Spider-Man bundle PS4 had in the US for a few weeks, but in Japan these type of promotions are rare, if the console drops in price is typically permanent; previously Sony had experimented with “hidden” price drops by not dropping the price of the systems themselves but rather giving away for free with them, they did it in 2015 with Bloodborne and last year with Everybody’s Golf, but the deal was much more aggressive this time.

From December 6^th to January 6^th they dropped the price of all base PS4 SKUs by 5000 yen, making the 500GB models cheaper than the Switch and the 1TB models the same price, that is a good deal by itself considering the base PS4 had retained its price since the new model release in 2016, but on top of that all new owners were given 2 games for free out of 21 Sony published titles, which included titles like Marvel’s Spider-Man which is Sony’s best selling title on PS4 outside of Call of Duty and Minecraft, and other fan favorites like Horizon: Zero Dawn and Detroit: Become Human.

With this and strong releases like Judgement and Dragon Quest Builders 2 sales increased some 7% from last December yet remained down year on year, it ended up as the weakest year for the base PS4 behind its launch year of 2014, the drop was mitigated due to strong sales of the PlayStation 4 Pro after high demand in January due to Monster Hunter and the system seeing a permanent price drop in October.

Nintendo 3DS also saw its weakest holiday at just 75k units sold, all expected as this was the last year of note for the system, in any way being the 3^rd all-time best-selling platform in Japan is not a bad result at all, 3DS will further crater into 2019.