lunes, 18 de marzo de 2019

Japan Monthly Report for February 2019


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 February was from February 4th to March 3rd.

This was a slow month, the slowest one we’ve seen in a long time, with the top selling game barely selling 100k and being the lowest units the best selling game of the month has done since I started making these. Otherwise decent software sales and strong hardware sales made a good enough result so that February 2019 is barely down from February 2018.
  • Hardware: Over 14 billion yen in revenue came from hardware sales, or around 2/3 of total revenue, Nintendo Switch once again carries the month being the best selling system in Japan for 12 months in a row and being the lion share of hardware revenue yet again. PS4 is at less than half of its sales.
  • Software: Over 8 billion yen in revenue was retail software, this was the weakest month for software since last July with most new releases underperforming, catalog software represents most of the sales and the PS4 moved the most software for the first time since last October. Overall software sales are down, with only the Nintendo Switch being up year on year.

Software

The best selling games of February 2019 were:
  1. [PS4] Jump Force – 107.763 (Around 900 million in revenue)
  2. [SWI] New Super Mario Bros. U Deluxe – 104.262 (Over 550 million in revenue)
  3. [SWI] Super Smash Bros. Ultimate – 101.109 (Over 650 million in revenue)
  4. [PS4] Anthem – 98.885 (Around 800 million in revenue)
  5. [PS4] Kingdom Hearts III – 67.802 (Around 500 million in revenue)
  6. [PS4] Catherine: Full Body – 61.225 (Over 500 million in revenue)
  7. [SWI] Pokémon: Let's Go Pikachu! / Let's Go Eevee! – 55.617 (Around 300 million in revenue)
  8. [PS4] Resident Evil 2 – 49.290 (Over 300 million in revenue)
  9. [PS4] Far Cry: New Dawn – 45.228 (Around 250 million in revenue)
  10. [SWI] Mario Kart 8 Deluxe – 42.881 (Around 250 million in revenue)

As mentioned before this was a weak month for new releases, with just 3 games selling over 100k and only one of them being a new game, on what could be considered the first true surprise result since I started making this, Bandai Namco’s Jump Force was the best selling game of the month.

Despite that sales are otherwise middling, Jump Force had the worst first week of a Jump crossover since 2005’s Jump! Super Stars, and while we don’t have data, there’s little doubt the original Famicom Jump games also did better at launch. But its not as if we were expecting it to do much better, the game did on par with other non traditional fighters on PS4 and already outsold most the traditional fighters on the system, the original announcement didn’t garner much attention in Japan either.

Anthem’s result were also surprising as the game had a stronger launch than what was expected a few months back, the game had one of the better new IP launches on PS4 but poor word of mouth is causing weak legs, either way it should end as one of the best selling EA game on PS4 outside of the Battlefield games.

On a disappointing result we have Catherine: Full Body, which after 3 weeks it has failed to reach half of what the original game sold on launch week, that by itself isn’t an issue, as this was an odd game to rerelease, but rather its sell through, there were 90k units shipped between the PS4, and the pointless, PSV version, 20k units are yet to sell through after 3 weeks is terrible to a more niche title like this, this is a poor showing for Atlus after last year’s Persona Q2 was also overshipped.

The biggest bomb is missing from this list however, as Left Alive was the #19th best selling game, it’s the first proper bomb of the year, with awful word of mouth, massive discounts and a terrible sell through.

The rest of the top 10 is mostly catalog software. Mario U Deluxe had a good second month and total sales of the game are over 500k by now, a million is not out of the question, though it seems like the announcement of Mario Maker 2 as negatively affected its sales. The other big January releases, Kingdom Hearts III and Resident Evil 2 saw big drops, with Kingdom Hearts dropping harder, it took the game 5 weeks to sell through its first week shipment and it has barely reach 800k, chances for a million are looking slim.

Resident Evil 2 is doing well, all things considered, and while it already outsold Resident Evil 7 is still well below what other previous entries did, the game should at least sell some 450k in Japan, maybe 500k if there’s some rerelease.

The best selling games of 2019 so far are:
  1. [PS4] Kingdom Hearts III – 790.003 (Over 6.5 billion yen in revenue)
  2. [SWI] Super Smash Bros. Ultimate – 548.371 (Around 3.6 billion in revenue)
  3. [SWI] New Super Mario Bros. U Deluxe – 485.731 (Over 2.8 billion in revenue)
  4. [PS4] Resident Evil 2 – 373.369 (Around 3 billion in revenue)
  5. [PS4] Ace Combat 7: Skies Unknown – 206.474 (Around 1.6 billion in revenue)
  6. [SWI] Super Mario Party – 193.071 (Over 1 billion in revenue)
  7. [SWI] Pokémon Let’s Go Pikachu! / Let’s Go Eevee! – 185.701 (Around 1 billion in revenue)
  8. [SWI] Mario Kart 8 Deluxe – 165.233 (Around 900 million yen in revenue)
  9. [SWI] Minecraft: Nintendo Switch Edition – 136.186 (Around 450 million in revenue)
  10. [SWI] Splatoon 2 – 114.932 (Over 600 million in revenue)

Best selling games of the past 12 months
  1. [SWI] Super Smash Bros. Ultimate – 2.909.026 (Over 20 billion yen in revenue)
  2. [SWI] Pokémon: Let's Go Pikachu! / Let's Go Eevee! – 1.439.378 (Over 8.5 billion yen in revenue)
  3. [SWI] Super Mario Party – 957.924 (Around 5.2 billion yen in revenue)
  4. [SWI] Splatoon 2 – 935.524 (Over 5.1 billion yen in revenue)
  5. [SWI] Mario Kart 8 Deluxe – 853.922 (Over 4.5 billion in revenue)
  6. [PS4] Kingdom Hearts III – 790.003 (Over 6.5 billion in revenue)
  7. [SWI] Kirby Star Allies – 697.729 (Over 4 billion in revenue)
  8. [SWI] Minecraft: Nintendo Switch Edition – 661.231 (Over 2.2 billion yen in revenue)
  9. [SWI] New Super Mario Bros. U Deluxe – 485.731 (Over 2.8 billion yen in revenue)
  10. [PS4] Call of Duty: Black Ops 4 – 474.157 (Over 3.6 billion in revenue)

Over 1.5 million retail games were sold in Japan for February, a 25% drop compared to the same month last year, PS4 sold the most software for the first time since last October at 790k units, while the Switch wasn’t too far behind at 660k units, the systems are tied in sales for the year so far and PS4 should surpass Switch by the end of March.

 

Nintendo remains the top publisher of the year selling some 360k games on February, more than twice as much as the second biggest publishers, Bandai Namco and Square Enix, tied at around 150k games sold, with EA at 100k and Atlus at 70k completing the top publishers for the month.

Square Enix sold around 1.2m games in all of 2018 in Japan and for 2019 so far they’ve already sold over 1m, this should be a much better year for them.

Hardware

For 12 months running the Nintendo Switch has been the best selling system in Japan, it is 50% up year on year, close to outselling the PS4 in Japan and a great line up starting from June this should be a great year for the system, potentially its peak year.

Last time PS4 was the best selling hardware was on February 2018, and its very unlikely the system will do it again soon, as this February the systems old 90k to Switch’s 240k. What PS4 has going for it now is a very strong lineup for Q1 2019 while Switch’s is poor for the first half of the year, though PS4 lineup becomes even more barren after Days Gone releases in April. A price cut for the system may happen soon though, as Sony has been doing temporary price drops, if it happens it should help for the remainder of the year. As is PS4 is down by nearly 50% year on year, and this could be one of the worst years ever for Sony in hardware sales in Japan.

The last noteworthy hardware related event was the announcement that the PlayStation Vita had been discontinued, it’ll be interesting to see how long stocks last as the game is just shy of 6m. The announcement also was that the system was discontinued, not that it was going to be, so its already over, sales should drop to selling hundreds per week, to mere dozens relatively fast.

The announcement made Vita sell 10k for the month, around half of what the 3DS did.

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