Japan’s December Hardware Sales

You’re probably already aware the December was all about Monster Hunter in Japan. There have been a number of small clues to that fact such as the PSP having its best ever week of sales when Portable 3rd launched.

Monster Hunter is the obvious cause of the PSP-3000 selling over 900k units in December.  What I have no explanation for is the sharp rise in PSPgo sales in the weeks before and after Christmas.

To find the last ‘blip’ in PSPgo sales we have to look back to the end of October when it received its price cut.  In that week it sold 3,031 units, almost exactly a third of the 9,083 it sold in the week ending 2nd January.

“It’s just seasonal sales”, I hear you say “of course it’ll sell more during the holidays”.  Let’s look at the ratio of its sales to those of the PSP-3000 then.  In the week of its price cut the ratio was 13:1 in favour of the PSP, while the October average was 24:1.

In the week after Christmas the ratio was down to 11:1.  The December average is over 45:1 and in Monster Hunter’s launch week the ratio reached more than 172:1, though remember the ’3000 almost certainly benefited from its related special edition.

One possible theory is that perhaps it is all about perception.  Gamers as a whole have largely been very cool in their welcome of the PSPgo.  I know some of you are big fans but those sales numbers from around the world that we have seen back up that assertion.  However, if you are a non-gamer buying a gift for a gamer which of the two PSPs would you buy?

Do you buy the one that you’ve been seeing on shelves since 2005 and doesn’t look that much different to the Sega Game Gear from 20 years ago which as a parent you may have played on when you were a child?  Or do you buy the one that slides open like modern mobiles, doesn’t need a separate memory stick and is more expensive so it must be better instead?

That’s the best theory I’ve got anyway.  Do you have a better one?  While you think one up here’s the usual weekly sales summaries.

Week Ending December 5th

Monster Hunter Portable 3rd launches and promptly sells 1.95 million copies and helps shift 323k PSPs in 5 days.  Before you protest that MH sold 2.14m copies so I must be wrong, note that that was a figure from Enterbrain, Japan’s other video games sales-counting outfit.  All the figures in this post come from Media Create.  No, I don’t know which is more correct but for the most part they are in general agreement and Media Create’s weekly numbers are easy to come by so I use theirs.

In a distant second place but with sales that would have been enough to take top spot most weeks was RPG Tales of Graces F for the PS3 with sales of 215k.  Next were two Mario games with the Wii’s Mario Sports Mix and Mario vs. Donkey Kong on the DS selling 59k and 57k respectively.

Rounding out the top five this week was Gran Turismo 5 which sold 55k copies.  Polyphony’s car-collecting game was less than a thousand sales ahead of monster-collecting game Pokemon Black/White.  Maybe the two games aren’t that different?  In one you tune and in the other train your collectibles to improve their stats.  Then you race/fight other collectibles, either AI or multi-player.  Consider GT’s B-Spec drivers instead of its cars and the parallels are even clearer though you can only ‘collect’ six of those.

Week Ending December 12th

Monster Hunter unsurprisingly retained its top spot this week as it would go on to do all month.  Its weekly sales were 629.5k making its total so far 2.58m.  The rest of the top five, indeed the top eight, was the preserve of games on Nintendo consoles.

This week saw the release of Level 5′s much anticipated collaboration with the awesome Studio Gibli, Ni No Kuni.  Sales of 170.5k saw it take second spot in the chart.  Donkey Kong Country Returns débuted in third place with 163.3k copies sold.  The ever-popular Pokemon Black/White climbed up to fourth with sales of 79.8k.  Mario Sports Mix took fifth place with 68.4k sales.

Sneaking into the top ten at ten over the bodies of lesser games with 36k kills sales was Assassin’s Creed: Brotherhood on the PS3 (#31 on the 360).  The Pokemon-like Gran Turismo 5 fell to sixteenth place with just under 24k sales, which were nonetheless enough to see it surpass the half million mark with a total of 510k.

Week Ending December 19th

Monster Hunter Watch: Weekly sales 581.5k, down 48k.  Total sales 3.16m.

With giant monsters locking out the top spot the giant robots in Gundam Musou 3 on the PS3 could only claim second place with sales of almost 186k.  Making it a top three of three-quels was anime-style football title Inazuma Eleven 3: The Ogre for the DS with 175.6k sales.  In keeping with the theme of threes, it is the third version of Inazuma Eleven 3 that Level 5 have released.

Populating the remainder of the top five were Donkey Kong Country Returns which almost matched its previous weeks sales with 152.9k.  The less-than-giant monsters of Pokemon Black/White racked up another 115.4k sales, significantly improving on its sales from the previous week.

Two new PS3 releases just made it into the top twenty with Castlevania Lords of Shadow reaching seventeenth with sales of just over 27k.  Entering at nineteenth having sold just 23k copies was the dubbed version of Call of Duty: Black Ops which performed much worse than the subtitled version which topped the chart for the week ending 21st November with almost 129k sales.

This week also finally saw the release in Japan of Final Fantasy XIII on the 360, a full year after it appeared on the PS3.  It entered the chart at number thirty nine well below the point where Media Create stop reporting sales figures for a title.  Given that it is not unusual for a 360 release to chart higher than that it would seem that few Japanese gamers were willing to wait for the title’s PS3 ‘exclusivity’ to elapse.

Week Ending December 26th 2010

Monster Hunter Watch: Weekly sales 404.1k, down 177.4k.  Total sales 3.56m.

In Christmas week one of those uniquely Japanese idol-worship games took second place in the software chart with over 236k sales.  Featuring the 48-member girl group AKB48 the PSP title AKB1/48 Idol to Koi Shitara, which Google suggests translates to “When you fall in love with AKB1/48 Idol”, apparently has you reject 47 of them while searching for the one you love the most.  Only.  In.  Japan.

Family-friendly entertainment on Nintendo’s consoles made up the rest of the top five with Donkey Kong Country Returns (214.5k) Pokemon Black/White (165k) and Wii Party (162k) maintaining their chart presence and taking the next three spots respectively.

Entering the chart in sixth is the PSP’s shower-scene-sporting, Parasite Eve sequel The 3rd Birthday with 140.4k copies sold.  Three titles in the top six gives a misleading view of how well PSP software and indeed all software for non-Nintendo consoles did this week.

There are no other PSP titles in the top thirty.  There is only one PS3 title in the top thirty five, Gundam Musou 3 at fourteenth, with Gran Turismo 5 having slipped to thirty sixth spot.  The 360 only has one title in the top fifty with a game called Cyber Troopers Virtual-Force from Sega at twenty ninth.

Other than that one 360 title the top fifty contains six PS3 games, nine PSP games, thirteen Wii games and twenty one DS games.

Week Ending January 2nd 2011

Monster Hunter Watch: Weekly sales 283.9k, down 120.2k.  Total sales 3.85m.

Donkey Kong’s return continued after Christmas with Donkey Kong Country Returns taking second place in the software chart with sales in excess of 107k.  Families obviously continued to spend some quality time with their Wiis over the holidays as Wii Party waggled its way up to third with sales of almost 103k.

Gamers continued to spurn 47 young female J-Popstars in AKB1/48 Idol to Koi Shitara which took fourth spot with sales of 63.5k.  Closing the top five this week was Mario Sports Mix with over 58k sales.

The 3rd Birthday fell to ninth with a little over 45k sales and in the wake of last week’s Nintendo chart domination Gundam Musou 3 climbed back up to take tenth place with over 43k sales.  Gran Turismo 5 recovered to twentieth place with almost 17k sales while not a single 360 game made the top fifty.

The Monthly Console and Corporate Fights

Looking at the month as a whole the Wii easily beat the PS3 (444,268 vs. 273,807), the PSPs beat the DSs (941,855 vs. 636,875) and as you probably worked out from the opening graph the PSPgo outsold the PS2 almost 2:1 (20,191 vs. 10,766).

Overall shares of the month’s hardware unit sales saw Sony take the largest slice of the pie.  Out of the 2,327,495 consoles sold Sony accounted for 53% (1,226,428), Nintendo 46% (1,081,143) and Microsoft 0.8% (19,924).

Finally, 2010′s last table of raw numbers:

Source: Media Create