Japan Monthly Report for June 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 June was from June 3rd to June 30th (4 weeks)

Summer begins with a very strong month for Nintendo Switch, after months without noteworthy releases we now got three as the long-awaited Super Mario Maker 2, the long delayed Yo-Kai Watch 4 and Konami’s newish baseball game all released. Things, however, look dire for PS4 as the biggest release for the month was the remaster of a PS3 game, it’ll be a weak few months for the PS4 as things should improve tremendously por Switch.

• Hardware: Over 10 billion yen in revenue came from hardware, being a flat result from May and a 15% increase over last June. Due to the performance for the rest of the year it’s clear that once again Nintendo Switch was the main source of revenue being nearly 80% of total revenue once again. Hardware sales remain stable for 2019.
• Software: Over 6 billion yen in revenue was from retail software, being a 50% increase over May but a slight decrease over last June. As this month was relatively strong in terms of releases we were able to see an increase over May, however, as Nintendo Switch games are typically cheaper than PlayStation 4 games the mere release of games don’t cause a huge revenue increase as a big PS4 release, nevertheless, as these games are long sellers their effects will just be felt in the long run.

Software

The best-selling games of June 2019 were:

1. [SWI] Super Mario Maker 2 – 196.153 (Over 1.2 billion yen in revenue)
2. [SWI] Yo-kai Watch 4 – 191.097 (Around 1.2 billion yen in revenue)
3. [SWI] Jikkyou Powerful Pro Baseball – 75.505 (Over 550 million yen in revenue)
4. [SWI] Doraemon: Story of Seasons – 65.544 (Over 400 million yen in revenue)
5. [SWI] Super Smash Bros. Ultimate – 37.252 (Over 250 million yen in revenue)
6. [SWI] Minecraft: Nintendo Switch Edition – 31.435 (Over 100 million yen in revenue)
7. [SWI] Mario Kart 8 Deluxe – 30.736 (Over 150 million yen in revenue)
8. [PS4] Yakuza 5 – 27.403 (Over 100 million yen in revenue)
9. [SWI] Pokémon: Let's Go Pikachu! / Let's Go Eevee! – 24.649 (Over 100 million yen in revenue)
10. [SWI] Splatoon 2 – 20.628 (Over 100 million yen in revenue)

Once again one PS4 game breaks what would an otherwise be a Nintendo Switch only top 10, unlike May that game wasn’t at the #1 spot. The last Yakuza remaster was the big PS4 game of the month and was the 8^th best selling game of the month, by now all main Yakuza games are already on PS4 all that’s left are some of the spin offs, as the remasters didn’t do anything special in Japan SEGA is probably using them as to increase awareness in the west (even if none of the remasters have even been announced for international release)

Super Mario Maker 2 was the best-selling game of the month, it had the biggest launch for a Nintendo Switch game of 2019 and saw a notable increase over the sales of the original Wii U game and it’s Nintendo 3DS port. SMM2 is expected to be the 2^nd best selling game of 2019 and it’s likely to sell strong for the remainder of the year; for all games retail no longer says the whole story, and this will matter for 1^st party Nintendo Switch titles for the rest of the summer as SMM2 starts the Nintendo Switch Voucher deal in which Nintendo Switch Online subscribers will be able to purchase 2 1^st party Nintendo Switch titles for 10000 yen, due to how much prices vary in Japan this is a particularly good deal as with some groups of titles you’d be saving enough to buy another full priced game. This deal will make things a bit iffy from now until Luigi’s Mansion 3 releases, as that’s the last game to use vouchers this year.

Professor Layton and Inazuma Eleven didn’t manage to survive a generation transition going from the Nintendo DS and the Nintendo 3DS, and it seems like Level 5’s big franchise this time, will have big problems as well. Launch sales of Yo-Kai Watch 4 are the weakest of the series after the first game debuting considerably below spin offs such as the Blasters games and Sangokushi. Results are undoubtedly disappointing as this was expected to become Nintendo Switch’s first third party million seller, now it seems unlikely it’ll sell 1 million at all. For what it’s worth the audience of the game might not be on Switch just yet, I’ve mentioned this back when last year’s Pokémon titles also underperformed, but the price of the system may be limiting children to enter on the Switch ecosystem just yet, we’ll have to wait and see what the game is at by the end of the year.

We also had a couple of smaller third party titles with Doraemon: Story of Seasons and Jikkyou Powerful Pro Baseball, the former is a Story of Season game with Doraemon characters, rather odd crossover, while it had the best launch for a Doraemon title in over a decade, it’s the weakest for a Story of Seasons in several years. This game may also have the same problem as Yo-Kai Watch though, it’ll keep selling for the rest of the year even if it doesn’t reach what Story of Seasons did on 3DS. It was very odd when last year’s Pawapro 2018 didn’t launch on Switch, and it’s even weirder that this year’s Pro Baseball Spirits also isn’t, but at least Konami is releasing a baseball game on the platform. Pawapro on Switch, which isn’t an original title, but somewhat of a mix of Pawapro 2018 and Pawapro 9, had a stronger launch than last year’s Pro Famista Evolution and will have no problem outselling it. It’ll be interesting to see how close it gets to the sales of the previous Pawapro games on PS4 and PSV and if next year’s Pawapro will release on the platform.

The rest of the top sellers are the same Nintendo Switch games we’ve talked to death about, nothing to see about them.

The bestselling games of 2019 so far are:

1. [PS4] Kingdom Hearts III – 838.927 (Over 6.7 billion in revenue)
2. [SWI] Super Smash Bros. Ultimate – 779.845 (Over 5.1 billion in revenue)
3. [SWI] New Super Mario Bros. U Deluxe – 643.426 (Over 3.7 billion in revenue)
4. [PS4] Resident Evil 2 – 386.678 (Over 3 billion in revenue)
5. [SWI] Mario Kart 8 Deluxe – 318.492 (Over 1.7 billion in revenue)
6. [SWI] Pokémon Let’s Go Pikachu! / Let’s Go Eevee! – 312.278 (Over 1.6 billion in revenue)
7. [SWI] Minecraft: Nintendo Switch Edition – 305.649 (Over 1 billion in revenue)
8. [SWI] Super Mario Party – 284.170 (Over 1.5 billion in revenue)
9. [PS4] Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice – 258.620 (Over 1.9 billion in revenue)
10. [SWI] Splatoon– 224.791 (Over 1.2 billion in revenue)

Bestselling games of the past 12 months:

1. [SWI] Super Smash Bros. Ultimate – 3.140.500 (Over 22.1 billion in revenue)
2. [SWI] Pokémon Let’s Go Pikachu! / Let’s Go Eevee! – 1.565.955 (Over 9.1 billion in revenue)
3. [SWI] Super Mario Party – 1.049.023 (Over 5.6 billion in revenue)
4. [PS4] Kingdom Hearts III – 838.927 (Over 6.7 billion in revenue)
5. [SWI] Mario Kart 8 Deluxe – 780.856 (Over 4.2 billion in revenue)
6. [SWI] Minecraft: Nintendo Switch Edition – 733.754 (Over 2.4 billion in revenue)
7. [SWI] Splatoon 2 – 694.040 (Over 3.7 billion in revenue)
8. [SWI] New Super Mario Bros. U Deluxe – 643.426 (Over 3.7 billion in revenue)
9. [PS4] Call of Duty: Black Ops 4 – 474.157 (Over 3.6 billion in revenue)
10. [PS4] Resident Evil 2 – 386.678 (Over 3 billion in revenue)

About 1.2 million games were sold in Japan during June, slightly more than in May and slightly less than in last June, Nintendo Switch software takes the lion share of both units and revenue selling 870k games at 5 billion yen in revenue, well after it is the PlayStation 4 selling over 260k games and under 1 billion in revenue. The dying handhelds sold less than 60k games combined, with Nintendo 3DS software outdoing PlayStation Vita software 3:1.

Nintendo again remains the top publisher, selling over 360k games, having their biggest month since January, behind them is Level 5, for the first time on these lists in a long time, having sold 200k games, after them go Bandai Namco and Konami having each sold around 80k games, and finally Microsoft, out of the strength of Minecraft, at about 35k.

Hardware

It is now the 16^th month of Nintendo Switch as the best selling hardware, the system sold over 156k units seeing a drop in sales in comparison to both May and last June, Switch remains as the top generator of revenue, with nearly 8 billion yen coming from Switch hardware sales.

The PlayStation 4 sells 93k units, greatly increasing results from May and being on par with June, the system had yet another price promotion with the Days of Play SKU resulting in the positive result, everything else combined sells less than 15k.