Japan Monthly Report for March 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 are calling March was from March 2nd to March 29th (4 weeks)

The biggest release of the year also caused a huge month, as both Animal Crossing: New Horizons and the Nintendo Switch hardware both broke sales records.

• Hardware: This was the biggest month for Nintendo Switch outside the holidays, as the system had its biggest week ever on the launch of Animal Crossing and one of its biggest weeks right after that. In addition to the new bundles and the new color for the Switch Lite made it so 600k units were sold in the country in just two weeks.
• Software: This was the biggest non holiday month since the launch of Dragon Quest XI back in July 2017 as Animal Crossing: New Horizons had the biggest retail launch in Japan since Pokémon Sun / Moon. It has very impressive for the game to had done as well as it did given how the digital market is ever increasing. Nintendo Switch and its software continues to impress.

Software

The best-selling games of March 2020 were:

1. [SWI] Animal Crossing: New Horizons – 2.608.417 (Over 16.7 billion in revenue)
2. [SWI] Pokémon Mystery Dungeon: Rescue Team DX – 218.394 (Over 1.4 billion in revenue)
3. [PS4] Nioh 2 – 129.302 (Over 1.1 billion in revenue)
4. [PS4] One Piece: Pirate Warriors 4 – 75.998 (Over 650 million in revenue)
5. [SWI] Pokémon Sword / Shield – 71.850 (Over 400 million in revenue)
6. [SWI] One Piece: Pirate Warriors 4 – 61.571 (Over 530 million in revenue)
7. [SWI] Mario Kart 8 Deluxe – 47.695 (Over 250 million in revenue)
8. [SWI] Minecraft: Nintendo Switch Edition – 46.744 (Over 150 million in revenue)
9. [SWI] Super Smash Bros. Ultimate – 42.219 (Around 300 million in revenue)
10. [SWI] RingFit Adventure – 40.164 (Over 350 million in revenue)

Animal Crossing: New Horizons broke several sales records as it had the franchise’s biggest launch (bigger than the combined launches of all other games in the series in fact, excluding spin offs) as well as the biggest launch on Nintendo Switch. By selling 2.6m during its first two weeks the game is also among the fastest selling games in Japan, and that is just with retail, including digital it may be upwards to 3.5 million. Launch week sales alone made it the best-selling game of the year, and it is clear nothing will get close. New Horizons could be the game that sells the most in a single year in the history of Japan.

The Pokémon Mystery Dungeon series also returned from a 4-year-old hiatus with a remake of the very first entry. As the series has been on decline for over a decade, it was interesting to see if this remake could put it back on track. The game’s launch was nothing special, debuting around the series average, but given how other Nintendo series has seen increases on Switch, and specially with the new influx of Switch owners after Animal Crossing this is a game that may keep selling well for some time.

It has been a rather rough generation for Koei Tecmo as for the past few years their best-selling games domestically have been in collaboration with other publishers such as with the Dragon Quest Heroes games as well as plenty of Nintendo works. They have been in an odd spot as their biggest cash cow, musou games, have only been dropping in popularity for several years, with their flagship series, Dynasty Warriors, hitting an all time low with the newest entry in 2018. They did manage to find a huge hit in 2017 with the long delayed Nioh, an action RPG that took a little inspiration from the Dark Souls series, which went on to become their best-selling game globally. As far as Japan was concerned there were low expectations for Nioh originally, yet the game’s very positive reception (as well as release timing) made it so the game went on to perform greatly above expectations selling over 200k units and became KT’s best selling game of the generation.

The game’s great sales in addition to big sales of similar games, most importantly From Software’s Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice (+360k), made it so we had high expectations for Nioh 2. As such its rather disappointing that there was basically no growth from the original game and that it sold less than it on launch month, despite that game having stock issues. There is a good chance that Nioh 2 did better digitally, as the original has been on sales several times and also had good digital sales, but it seems like it failed to expand it’s audience and its selling to just those that enjoy the original.

The final notable release for the month was One Piece: Pirate Warriors 4. That series series is one of the prime examples of the drop in popularity of the musou genre in Japan, as the original game went on to sell over 830k units, becoming publisher Bandai Namco’s best selling game domestically as well as one of the best selling games on PS3. The sequel released a bit over a year later went on to sell around 520k units, still quite good sales, but a large drop, especially as it released on an additional platform. Two years after that the third game released and further dropped to under 330k units. As this series only went down a further drop was expected, yet it was not as large as with the previous games, not on launch at least. This is the 2^nd notable multiplatform title for the year, PS4 still leads on sales over Switch games in that regard, but this is a game were they’ve been rather close, and there’s a good chance the Switch version sells more than the PS4 version in the long run.

As always, the rest of the best selling games are older titles all of which keep selling well and have seen their sales increase thanks to the launch of Animal Crossing, all except for RingFit Adventure, which is still out of stock.

The best-selling games of the year so far:

1. [SWI] Animal Crossing: New Horizons – 2.608.417 (Over 16.7 billion in revenue)
2. [SWI] Pokémon Sword / Shield – 554.390 (Over 3.2 billion in revenue)
3. [SWI] RingFit Adventure – 249.488 (Over 2 billion in revenue)
4. [PS4] Yakuza 7: Like a Dragon – 243.769 (Over 2.1 billion in revenue)
5. [SWI] Pokémon Mystery Dungeon: Rescue Team DX – 218.394 (Over 1.4 billion in revenue)
6. [SWI] Minecraft: Nintendo Switch Edition – 185.900 (Over 600 million in revenue)
7. [SWI] Mario Kart 8 Deluxe – 181.921 (Over 1 billion in revenue)
8. [SWI] Super Smash Bros. Ultimate – 170.222 (Over 1.1 billion in revenue)
9. [SWI] Dr Kawashima's Brain Training for Nintendo Switch – 151.351 (Over 500 million in revenue)
10. [PS4] Persona 5 Scramble: The Phantom Strikers – 149.898 (Over 1.4 billion in revenue)

The best-selling games of the past 12 months

1. [SWI] Pokémon Sword / Shield – 3.542.524 (Over 21.4 billion in revenue)
2. [SWI] Animal Crossing: New Horizons – 2.608.417 (Over 16.7 billion in revenue)
3. [SWI] Super Mario Maker 2 – 883.419 (Over 5.3 billion in revenue)
4. [SWI] RingFit Adventure – 745.127 (Over 6.1 billion in revenue)
5. [SWI] Super Smash Bros. Ultimate – 630.898 (Over 4.2 billion in revenue)
6. [SWI] Minecraft: Nintendo Switch Edition – 624.281 (Over 2.1 billion in revenue)
7. [SWI] Luigi's Mansion 3 – 623.480 (Over 3.7 billion in revenue)
8. [SWI] Mario Kart 8 Deluxe – 604.165 (Over 3.3 billion in revenue)
9. [SWI] Dragon Quest XI S: Echoes of an Elusive Age - Definitive Edition – 502.880 (Over 4.2 billion in revenue)
10. [PS4] Monster Hunter: World - Iceborne Master Edition – 439.916 (Over 2.8 billion in revenue)

More than 4 million games were sold for the month, doubling sales for March 2019, and bringing total software sales for 2020 on positive numbers. One of the most one-sided months Nintendo Switch sold 3.5 million games to PS4’s 470k. At 5 million games sold for the year so far Switch is so over year on year than it is likely to offset the loss of retail sales on the upcoming months due to the pandemic. Total boxed sales of Nintendo Switch software in Japan is now over 43 million units, just 3 million off from outselling software sales of the PS4.

Sadly, this will be the last time we will be able to give such precise data regarding overall software sales as tracker DengekiOnline ended their sales tracking after 8 years this month. Back in October it was announced that they would be merged into Famitsu, having two publications doing sales tracking probably seemed pointless to father company Enterbrain/Kadokawa so one had to go and DengekiOnline ended with the fiscal year in a rather sudden announcement.

Hopefully Famitsu will incorporate what made Dengeki’s reports unique but given how little Famitsu has changed in the last 25 years I would not hold my breath.

As they just released the biggest game of the year Nintendo was also the top publisher for the month, selling over 3 million games, their biggest month since December 2018 and Super Smash Bros. Ultimate. Well after them go the Pokémon Co. selling over 300k units, Bandai Namco with over 200k and Koei Tecmo with over 150k, no other publishers sold 100k games.

Hardware

As the COVID-19 pandemic has disrupted manufacture chains and caused Nintendo Switch shortages not seen since summer 2017 we had to lower expectations on how much would Switch sales increase once Animal Crossing released. We were expecting at least a bump in sales due to the bundle of the game with the standard console as well as the coral Nintendo Switch Lite. It seems like Nintendo and or retailers had been saving a huge amount of units for the launch of the game as Switch had it’s best ever week on the launch of Animal Crossing outdoing any holiday week and it’s launch week, stock was still plentiful enough to also have a gigantic second week. The system sold nearly 800k units for all of March and it had the potential to do much more as even on it’s biggest weeks the system could still not meet demand and the system is to be severely understocked for weeks, if not months to come as shortages for the system are now affecting the Americas and Europe as well.

There was an increase of PS4 sales near the end of the month, likely due to the Final Fantasy VII remake, yet sales of the system remain well below those of 2019. Sony has announced the game will be bundled so there should be a big sales increase once the game release, maybe not enough to outsell Switch but should be the best week of the year for PS4. The bundles are unique in that they don’t cost the same as the console + the game separately (as is usually the case for bundles in Japan) but just the cost of the system, that may interest casual fans as the FFVIIR is quite expensive so there are large savings.