Japan Monthly Report for January 2020

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 January was from December 30^th, 2019 to February 2^nd, 2020 (5 weeks)

For the past few years we’ve grown accustomed for January to be a strong month as many publishers are releasing big games outside the main holiday season and before the end of the fiscal year, however, this January is the weakest we’ve seen in some time as the new games didn’t do as well as expected, causing overall software sales to be down, even if hardware sales remain high.

• Hardware: Over 15 billion yen in revenue came from hardware, it’s a 40% drop over last January, as with the past few months most hardware sales and revenue came from Nintendo Switch as sales of the PlayStation 4 collapsed after its brief price drop ended, with the system seeing its weakest January since 2015 while the Nintendo Switch keeps on climbing.
• Software: Over 13 billion yen in revenue came from retail software, it’s a nearly 50% drop in comparison to last January, the lack of notable releases keep affecting software sales as once again Nintendo Switch was the top seller of software on units sold and revenue, just as with hardware this was the worst January for PS4 software since 2015.

Software

The best-selling games of January 2020 were:

1. [SWI] Pokémon Sword / Shield – 391.603 (Over 2.2 billion in revenue)
2. [PS4] Yakuza 7: Like a Dragon – 217.870 (Over 1.9 billion in revenue)
3. [SWI] RingFit Adventure – 157.118 (Around 1.3 billion in revenue)
4. [PS4] Dragon Ball Z: Kakarot – 129.072 (Over 1 billion in revenue)
5. [SWI] Dr Kawashima's Brain Training for Nintendo Switch – 97.835 (Over 300 million in revenue)
6. [SWI] Minecraft: Nintendo Switch Edition – 97.621 (Over 300 million in revenue)
7. [SWI] Mario Kart 8 Deluxe – 97.483 (Around 550 million in revenue)
8. [SWI] Super Smash Bros. Ultimate – 90.269 (Ove 600 million in revenue)
9. [SWI] Luigi's Mansion 3 – 84.124 (Around 500 million in revenue)
10. [SWI] Mario & Sonic at the Olympic Games Tokyo 2020 – 69.507 (Around 400 million in revenue)

Pokémon Sword / Shield has been the best selling game in Japan for three months in a row, they are the second game to do that since Super Mario Maker 2 did it from June to August last year, while they are behind titles such as Pokémon X / Y and Sun / Moon launches aligned it’s January sales were considerably higher than either of those titles, it’s the second best performance for a Nintendo Switch game on January after last year’s Super Smash Bros. Ultimate. We know that digital sales for the game are quite high, as with that it has sold over 4 million units, surpassing total sales of Pokémon Sun / Moon, as for this entry GameFreak has opted to do DLC expansions rather than a new release we should see it selling well for the whole year.

The biggest new game to release this month was SEGA’s Yakuza 7, they took a gamble with this new entry as it stars a brand new character and, more notably, change the battle system, from what was a brawler to a turn based RPG. As the Yakuza series has been in decline for the entire PS4 generation, with Yakuza 6  and Yakuza Kiwami 2 being the lowest selling main game and 2^nd worst selling game in the series respectively, even spin offs such as Fist of the North Star: Lost paradise also had underwhelming sales, such a drastic change may be worth trying.

Whether or not SEGA’s experiment will pay off remains to be seen, but the game had a soft launch as expected, debuting below Yakuza 6 but showing some decent legs, if turn based Yakuza will stick will be seen on sales of future spin offs or with Yakuza 8 (assuming they stick with the format).

The other big game for the month was Dragon Ball Z: Kakarot, Bamco’s new DBZ game is a lengthy RPG that adapts the entirety of DBZ story line. For the past few years, outside of 3DS games, we’ve learned not to expect much from Dragon Ball games in Japan, so there were low expectations for this one, with that being said, it had a fairly decent launch, being the biggest launch for a Dragon Ball game on PS4.

As you probably noticed the rest of the top sellers are old games, RingFit Adventure keeps performing very well and is still supply constrained 4 months after release, this one should be a mainstay among the top sellers for months to come, and yes, it should have no problem selling over 1 million units. The new Brain training game (released on late December, first time we’re talking about it) is also doing well with very soft drops week on week, while the game is performing nowhere near what the series did on it’s heyday on Nintendo DS, it is doing well in comparison to the last entry on 3DS, this is the kind of game that may sell alongside RingFit Adventure to the more casual audience on Nintendo Switch, it’ll be interesting to see how it performs in the upcoming months, especially after Animal Crossing: New Horizon releases.

Other old, but not so old games also keep selling well, as Luigi’s Mansion and Mario & Sonic had softer post-holiday drops than expected, the latter still has the actual Olympics later this year for a final push, while it’s hard to say if Luigi’s Mansion 3 will be able to launch sales of its predecessor.

Super Smash Bros. Ultimate is on its 2^nd January among the top sellers, while it’s the 3^rd for Mario Kart 8 Deluxe.

The best-selling games of the past 12 months

1. [SWI] Pokémon Sword / Shield – 3.379.737 (Over 20.5 billion in revenue)
2. [SWI] Super Mario Maker 2 – 847.904 (Over 5.1 billion yen in revenue)
3. [SWI] Super Smash Bros. Ultimate – 735.404 (Over 4.08 billion in revenue)
4. [SWI] RingFit Adventure – 652.757 (Over 5.3 billion in revenue)
5. [SWI] Minecraft: Nintendo Switch Edition – 621.959 (Over 2.1 billion in revenue)
6. [SWI] Mario Kart 8 Deluxe – 603.943 (Over 3.3 billion in revenue)
7. [SWI] Luigi’s Mansion 3 – 590.122 (Over 3.5 billion in revenue)
8. [SWI] Dragon Quest XI S: Echoes of an Elusive Age - Definitive Edition – 482.833 (Over 4 billion in revenue)
9. [PS4] Monster Hunter: World - Iceborne Master Edition – 430.813 (Over 2.8 billion in revenue)
10. [SWI] Super Mario Party – 405.998 (Over 2.8 billion in revenue)

More than 2.5 million games were sold in Japan for January, a 40% drop from last January, once again most software sales come from Nintendo Switch games, which despite no major launches for the month, moved over 1.7 million games seeing a 13% drop over last January, meanwhile PlayStation 4 is off to its weakest start of the year yet, moving 750k games seeing a 58% drop over last January. 3DS and Vita moved less than 40k games.

Nintendo starts off the year as the top publisher, having sold over 830k games on January, unsurprisingly after Nintendo go the Pokémon Company having moved over 400k games. SEGA, Bandai Namco and Microsoft round up the top publishers for the start of 2020.

Hardware

Nintendo Switch is the bestselling hardware in Japan for the 23^rd month in a row seeing it’s biggest January yet moving over 640k units, sales of the original Nintendo Switch SKU still lead sales as the cheap Lite keeps on track. PlayStation 4 on the other hand sees its weakest January yet, selling less than 100k units, it’s one of the most one-sided months we’ve seen in some time.

It’ll be interesting to see how the outbreak of the COVID-19 coronavirus affects hardware sales in the upcoming months, as factories across China are closed this will affect the production of videogame hardware. Nintendo already announced how it’s affecting Nintendo Switch production, they have also moved some of the system’s production out of China it’s unlikely factories outside the country will be able to produce the system in order to meet demand, so it mostly depends on how many units are on warehouses for the time being.

PS4 is less likely to be affected by this being a much older system, chances are that there’s more than enough stock for some time, and it’s not like demand it’s all that high anyway. Additionally, it’ll be interesting to see if this somehow affects the launch of the Xbox Series X as well as the PlayStation 5, even if those are still ways away.