Japan Monthly Report for May 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 April was from April 29th to June 2nd (5 weeks)

This was the most boring month we’ve seen in years with no notable releases at retail or digital, had it not been for strong Nintendo Switch hardware and software sales it would’ve been a disaster. Nintendo Switch finally managed to outsell the PS4, though, which was the most notable event for the month, even if it was long expected to happen.

• Hardware: Over 10 billion yen or revenue came from software, being flat from both April and last May. Yet again Nintendo Switch is the lion share of revenue, being over 80% of total revenue. Strong sales of the console make it, so hardware revenue remains flat year on year, even when software revenue drops.
• Software: Over 4 billion yen of revenue came from software, being the lowest amount, we’ve seen since we started tracking, and being a large drop from last May and April. Software revenue is driven by new releases, and there wasn’t any this month, as such the disappointing result isn’t very surprising. As with hardware, software revenue is driven by Nintendo Switch.

Software

The best-selling games of May 2019 were:

1. [PS4] Days Gone – 60.496 (Over 300 million yen in revenue)
2. [SWI] Super Smash Bros. Ultimate – 60.098 (Around 400 million yen in revenue)
3. [SWI] Minecraft: Nintendo Switch Edition – 51.250 (Around 170 million yen in revenue)
4. [SWI] Mario Kart 8 Deluxe – 48.472 (Over 250 million yen in revenue)
5. [SWI] New Super Mario Bros. U Deluxe – 40.964 (Over 200 million yen in revenue)
6. [SWI] Pokémon: Let's Go Pikachu! / Let's Go Eevee! – 36.868 (Around 200 million yen in revenue)
7. [SWI] Splatoon 2 – 32.734 (Over 170 million yen in revenue)
8. [SWI] Yoshi's Crafted World – 32.081 (Over 170 million yen in revenue)
9. [SWI] The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild – 29.495 (Over 180 million yen in revenue)
10. [SWI] Super Mario Party – 28.754 (Over 150 million yen in revenue)

Days Gone breaks what would’ve otherwise been a Nintendo Switch only Top 10. The game stays as the best-selling title for two months in a row, on the closest it’s been to be the top seller with less than 400 units separating it from Super Smash Bros. Ultimate.

Despite having a better launch than other Sony wester titles on PS4, the game has shown weaker legs than some of them, performing worse than God of War, Horizon: Zero Dawn and Detroit: Become Human, even though it has already outsold 2 of those titles. Seems like the game was also over shipped as after a full month it hasn’t sold through the remaining stock. The game will sell over 200k, but with that launch more was expected.

The rest of the top 10 is comprised of Switch games that has been discussed plenty on these reports so there’s not much to say. Smash Ultimate was almost the best-selling game of the month, Mario Kart 8 Deluxe returns to this list after missing it on April with other Switch games such as Zelda and Splatoon returning from some absences as Yoshi and Mario U Deluxe keep doing well.

The bestselling games of 2019 so far are:

1. [PS4] Kingdom Hearts III – 833.828 (Over 6.7 billion in revenue)
2. [SWI] Super Smash Bros. Ultimate – 751.284 (Over 4.8 billion in revenue)
3. [SWI] New Super Mario Bros. U Deluxe – 630.294 (Over 3.6 billion in revenue)
4. [PS4] Resident Evil 2 – 386.678 (Over 3 billion in revenue)
5. [SWI] Mario Kart 8 Deluxe – 295.861 (Over 1.5 billion in revenue)
6. [SWI] Pokémon Let’s Go Pikachu! / Let’s Go Eevee! – 287.629 (Over 1.5 billion in revenue)
7. [SWI] Minecraft: Nintendo Switch Edition – 274.214 (Over 900 million in revenue)
8. [SWI] Super Mario Party – 270.729 (Over 1.5 billion in revenue)
9. [PS4] Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice – 256.038 (Over 1.9 billion in revenue)
10. [PS4] Ace Combat 7: Skies Unknown – 206.474 (Over 1.6 billion in revenue)

Bestselling games of the past 12 months.

1. [SWI] Super Smash Bros. Ultimate – 3.103.248 (Over 21.8 billion in revenue)
2. [SWI] Pokémon Let’s Go Pikachu! / Let’s Go Eevee! – 1.541.306 (Over 9 billion in revenue)
3. [SWI] Super Mario Party – 1.035.582 (Over 5.6 billion in revenue)
4. [PS4] Kingdom Hearts III – 832.771 (Over 6.7 billion in revenue)
5. [SWI] Mario Kart 8 Deluxe – 799.739 (Over 4.3 billion in revenue)
6. [SWI] Minecraft: Nintendo Switch Edition – 799.259 (Over 2.7 billion in revenue)
7. [SWI] Splatoon 2 – 748.453 (Over 4 billion in revenue)
8. [SWI] New Super Mario Bros. U Deluxe – 625.770 (Over 3.6 billion in revenue)
9. [PS4] Call of Duty: Black Ops 4 – 474.157 (Over 3.6 billion in revenue)
10. [SWI] Mario Tennis Aces – 417.989 (Over 2 billion in revenue)

Around 1.1 million games were sold in May, a mild drop from April, but a large 40% drop from last May, Nintendo Switch represents the most of software once again with over 650k games sold for the month, PlayStation 4 goes after with 340k games sold for the month and everything else selling less than 100k.

Nintendo remains the top publisher in Japan for 5 months in a row selling over 300k games in May, Sony is the second biggest publisher, but well behind, selling around 70k games, followed by Microsoft, selling over 50k. Very interesting to see that the top publishers for the month are also the console manufacturers, even if one barely matters in Japan.

Hardware

Nintendo Switch remains the top dog in Japan for the 15^th month in a row, the system finally surpassed sales of the PlayStation 4 this month and the gap between them is only going to widen as the year goes on.

Switch sales 175k units, slightly less than April and last May, PS4 sells 58k much less than last May but up from April, there was yet another price promotion for PS4 in May causing that. 3DS sells 20k, with everything else being less than 3k.