Third-parties in Japan in 2013 made more and better money on Nintendo.
☆ NintendObs Weekly – Monday, March 3, 2014 – Sunday, March 9, 2014.
Using Famitsu’s poll of Japan’s top 100 best-selling games of 2013, I have established a sensible overview of the 2013 Japanese videogames market, a market essentially shared between Nintendo and Sony platforms. All the data you’ll read is factual, directly produced from Famitsu’s research (courtesy of Neogaf).
I’ll start with an observation of the most prominent totals:
- total amount of ranked sales on Nintendo platforms – 22,764,036 software units,
- total amount of ranked sales on Sony PlayStation platforms – 10,727,892 software units,
- total amount of ranked revenue on Nintendo platforms – 119,337,116,441 yen,
- total amount of ranked revenue on Sony PlayStation platforms – 73,537,840,458 yen.
Which leads to the following observations in terms of percentage:
- 67.97% of ranked sales were made on Nintendo platforms,
- 32.03% of ranked sales were made on Sony PlayStation platforms,
- 61.87% of ranked revenue were made on Nintendo platforms,
- 38.13% of ranked revenue were made on Sony PlayStation platforms.
These findings could reveal that about 2/3 of software sales in Japan in 2013 were made on Nintendo, while roughly 60% of software revenue this year were also generated on Nintendo platforms.
I’ll then delve into a comparison of first-party title importance:
- total amount of ranked sales of first-party Nintendo titles – 12,442,439 software units,
- total amount of ranked sales of first-party Sony PlayStation titles – 699,546 software units,
- total amount of ranked revenue from first-party Nintendo titles – 61,167,440,910 yen,
- total amount of ranked revenue from first-party Sony PlayStation titles – 4,465,971,080 yen.
Which leads to the following observations in terms of percentage:
- 37.15% of total ranked sales were made of first-party Nintendo titles,
- 2.09% of total ranked sales were made of first-party Sony PlayStation titles,
- 31.71% of total ranked revenue were made from first-party Nintendo titles,
- 2.32% of total ranked revenue were made from first-party Sony PlayStation titles.
These findings could suggest that around 1/3 of software sales in Japan in 2013 were of first-party Nintendo titles, while about 30% of software revenue came from such first-party Nintendo titles.
I’ll now observe the third-party side of things:
- out of 46 ranked Nintendo titles, 27 of them were third-party titles,
- out of 54 ranked Sony titles, 51 of them were third-party titles,
- total amount of ranked sales of third-party Nintendo titles – 10,321,597 software units,
- total amount of ranked sales of third-party Sony PlayStation titles – 10,028,346 software units,
- total amount of ranked revenue from third-party Nintendo titles – 58,169,675,531 yen,
- total amount of ranked revenue from third-party Sony PlayStation titles – 69,071,869,378 yen.
Which leads to the following observations in terms of average:
- average ranked sales per third-party title on Nintendo platforms – 382,281 software units,
- average ranked sales per third-party title on Sony PlayStation platforms – 196,634 software units,
- average ranked revenue per third-party title on Nintendo platforms – 2,154,432,427 yen,
- average ranked revenue per third-party title on Sony PlayStation platforms – 1,354,350,380 yen.
These findings show that the best third-party endeavors in Japan in 2013 produced individually nearly 2 times more sales (1.94x) and revenue (1.59x) on Nintendo platforms than they did on Sony PlayStation platforms.
What’s more, with 89% of these ranking third-party Nintendo titles being on portable consoles (3DS) and with 65% of these ranking third-party Sony titles being on home consoles (PS3), also considering development costs being notoriously higher on the PS3 than they are on the 3DS, one could argue that not only third-parties in Japan in 2013 made MORE money on Nintendo, but they actually made even BETTER money on Nintendo than they did on Sony.
You’ll find the entirety of my research in the Microsoft Excel sheet I joined below, including other tidbits of lesser importance (3D World outsold Lightning Returns, Monster Hunter 4 made more revenue than Pokémon X/Y…) which were still fun to uncover. I hope to have made clear to what extent Nintendo dominates Japan, and it is my firm belief that this is not gonna change anytime soon.
At NintendObserver, the comments are on Discord.
Click on Community to learn more. 🙂
…
…Wanna play? Buy a Wii U.
And if you’ve already got yours, here are all the games already available on the platform. 😀
