Japan Monthly Report for September 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 September was from September 2^nd to September 29th (4 weeks)

The first half of the fiscal year ended this month, usually Japanese companies tend to release plenty of games in this period for that reason, and this September was no exception with plenty of new releases and plenty of high sales. The biggest news of the month, however, was the launch of the new Nintendo Switch SKU, the handheld focused and cheaper Nintendo Switch Lite. Plenty of new releases and the new hardware made up for very positive results as September ended up being the 2^nd best month of the year.

• Hardware: This was the biggest month for hardware for the year so far, with nearly 26 billion yen of hardware revenue, on hardware alone September is the biggest month since January. Nintendo Switch obviously makes up most of the revenue still, with the Nintendo Switch Lite alone doing over 15 billion yen of revenue by itself. One thing to note is that sales of the standard Switch were also quite high, being nearly 50% up year on year by itself. Lite isn’t really replacing Switch as more as it’s complementing it, so it’ll be interesting to see how the two SKUs do going forward.
• Software: While not having the huge performance as hardware, September was the second biggest month for retail software in 2019, making 14 billion yen of revenue, as there were plenty of high profile releases in September, most revenue comes from them as opposed to legacy software as we’ve seen plenty of times already, games like Monster Hunter: World – Iceborne Master Edition, Dragon Quest XI S, Zelda: Link’s Awakening and Winning Eleven 2020 all saw high sales, making up the high revenue.

Software

The best-selling games of September 2019 were:

1. [PS4] Monster Hunter: World - Iceborne Master Edition – 346.239 (Over 2.4 billion in revenue)
2. [SWI] Dragon Quest XI S: Echoes of an Elusive Age - Definitive Edition – 303.204 (Over 2.7 billion in revenue)
3. [SWI] The Legend of Zelda: Link's Awakening – 187.150 (Over 1.2 billion yen in revenue)
4. [PS4] eFootball Winning Eleven 2020 – 86.822 (Around 700 million yen in revenue)
5. [PS4] Monster Hunter: World – Iceborne – 65.295 (Over 300 million yen in revenue)
6. [SWI] Super Mario Maker 2 – 62.444 (Over 350 million yen in revenue)
7. [PS4] Code Vein – 60.843 (Around 550 million yen in revenue)
8. [PS4] Atelier Ryza Ever Darkness & the Secret Hideout – 53.428 (Over 450 million yen in revenue)
9. [PS4] Borderlands 3 – 52.079 (Around 400 million yen in revenue)
10. [SWI]Super Smash Bros. Ultimate – 46.447 (Over 300 million yen in revenue)

A Monster Hunter title is back on these lists after a long absence, with not one but two SKUs, the top seller of the month comes with the base game of Monster Hunter: World as well as it’s new DLC expansion, Monster Hunter: World – Iceborne, while at #5 is just the expansion. Back when it was announced I wasn’t expecting much from this release, Iceborne is basically Monster Hunter: World G, however, unlikely previous G rereleases, this is an expansion that people with the game can already just buy, not a separate game. It goes without saying that most people interested in getting Iceborne will just buy the expansion by itself digitally. Be as it be, the Master Edition did well and it has been showing some pretty good legs, the game should keep selling well for the rest of the year, probably becoming the 2^nd best selling PS4 game of 2019.

The first game announced for Nintendo Switch was then the 2^nd best seller for the month, with Dragon Quest XI S moving some 300k units. Dragon Quest titles typically wait around 10 years before the get rereleased, the situation with XI S is quite unique as it’s been less than 2, as such the game had a much weaker launch in comparison to other Dragon Quest rereleases, yet it’s the best third party launch on Nintendo Switch, and the biggest launch on the platform for the year so far, it’s hard to say just how high this game will go, but the launch was good.

The first Zelda title post Breath of the Wild also released, as Nintendo remake the Game Boy classic Link’s Awakening on Switch, as this is another game on Nintendo’s voucher program, where 2 games of a selected list can be bought for 10.000 yen, it’s hard to gauge it’s retail performance. It did worse than any of the 3DS Zelda titles except for Triforce Heroes, though as mentioned some months ago, as the game is so different from BOTW, it’s unlikely the audience that made that game a hit will come to this one.

After a brief period of growth on PS4, Winning Eleven is back on the decline, as the new Winning Eleven 2020 had the weakest opening in the series since Winning Eleven 3 back in 1997, football games as a whole are to do badly this year in Japan, as FIFA 20, which couldn’t enter Top 10, also had a weaker launch than last year, and it’ll likely have worse legs this year. At least we’ve seen baseball games do unusually well, so it’s not all bad for sports games.

The most positive results for software was the launch of Atelier Ryza, the series has been on a big decline since the PS3 years, with the last few entries having some of the worst launches in the series (though there has been some oversaturation, after all, Atelier Ryza is the 3^rd Atelier games released in 2019), however Atelier Ryza makes up for a big series rebound as it sees the biggest launch for the series since 2011’s Atelier Meruru and it’s the 2^nd biggest ever launch for the series overall. The game also had shortages, and Koei Tecmo reported 150k units shipped by September 30^th, very good launch for the series.

On lesser launches there was also Code Vein, a new souls like game from the developers of the God Eater series, while the launch is much weaker than any of From’s own titles (including Bloodborne and Sekiro) it’s also much better than any other souls like game released in the country, even though most of them have come from western developers, Code Vein is essentially the first big Japanese souls like game not made by From Software.

The bestselling games of 2019 so far are:

1. [SWI] Super Smash Bros. Ultimate – 918.997 (Over 6 billion in revenue)
2. [PS4] Kingdom Hearts III – 838.927 (Over 6.7 billion in revenue)
3. [SWI] New Super Mario Bros. U Deluxe – 690.592 (Over 3.9 billion in revenue)
4. [SWI] Super Mario Maker 2 – 664.445 (Over 3.8 billion yen in revenue)
5. [SWI] Mario Kart 8 Deluxe – 441.325 (Over 2.4 billion in revenue)
6. [SWI] Minecraft: Nintendo Switch Edition – 420.945 (Over 1.4 billion in revenue)
7. [PS4] Resident Evil 2 – 393.688 (Over 3.1 billion in revenue)
8. [SWI] Pokémon Let’s Go Pikachu! / Let’s Go Eevee! – 386.182 (Over 1.9 billion in revenue)
9. [SWI] Super Mario Party – 355.046 (Over 1.9 billion in revenue)
10. [PS4] Monster Hunter: World - Iceborne Master Edition – 346.239 (Over 2.4 billion in revenue)

Bestselling games of the past 12 months:

1. [SWI] Super Smash Bros. Ultimate – 3.279.682 (Over 23 billion in revenue)
2. [SWI] Pokémon Let’s Go Pikachu! / Let’s Go Eevee! – 1.639.959 (Over 9.5 billion in revenue)
3. [SWI] Super Mario Party – 1.119.899 (Over 6 billion in revenue)
4. [PS4] Kingdom Hearts III – 838.927 (Over 6.7 billion in revenue)
5. [SWI] New Super Mario Bros. U Deluxe – 690.592 (Over 3.9 billion in revenue)
6. [SWI] Mario Kart 8 Deluxe – 683.197 (Over 3.7 billion in revenue)
7. [SWI] Super Mario Maker 2 – 664.445 (Over 3.8 billion yen in revenue)
8. [SWI] Minecraft: Nintendo Switch Edition – 641.002 (Over 2.1 billion in revenue)
9. [SWI] Splatoon 2 – 484.470 (Over 2.6 billion in revenue)
10. [PS4] Call of Duty: Black Ops 4 – 474.157 (Over 3.6 billion in revenue)

Around 2.2 million games were sold in September, being the highest result since January. Software sales are up from August as well as last September, with an even split between the platforms, as Nintendo Switch sold 1.2m games to PlayStation 4 930k.

Despite strong third-party releases Nintendo remains as the top publisher in Japan for the 10^th month in a row, selling around 500k games, behind them go Capcom with 440k games and Square Enix at 320k games. Despite the huge difference in units sold, the three are essentially tied on revenue at 2.8 billion yen each. Bandai Namco and Konami close the top 5 publishers, selling 130k and 115k units respectively.

Hardware

As mentioned before, this was the biggest month of hardware for the year so far, as the newly released Nintendo Switch Lite drove plenty of sales, though the standard Switch didn’t falter despite the new SKU and was the best selling system for the month, even Monster Hunter: World – Iceborne help sales of PS4 quite a bit.

The Nintendo Switch SKU with the improved battery released on late August so most of it’s sales truly came from November, that SKU was also the one that had the Dragon Quest XI bundle, which made it sell over 300k units for the month, surpassing total sales of 9 million units. The Nintendo Switch lite then sold 258K for the month, being the 2^nd biggest launch for a system of its kind, only behind the Nintendo 3DS XL. Lite is the most interesting hardware SKU to see come the holidays, as the Pokémon Bundle and its price are likely to drive up sales plenty.

The PlayStation 4 sold over 110k units, seeing it’s highest performance since March, the system’s drought has finally concluded and sales should remain steady for the remainder of the year, after all PS4 is getting at least one big game every month from now until next March, a price drop, which we’ve proposed plenty, could also happen.

One thing to note going forward is the increase on tax on game consoles/systems that is hitting Japan on October 1^st, the increase isn’t very large, going from 8% to 10%, but such an increase before has preceded a recession in Japan, so the public is wary, sales may not be as good as the could be otherwise due to this, though expect it to impact hardware sales more than software sales.