Every Thursday here on GL we share the weekly Famitsu sales charts, which tracks physical boxed game sales and hardware sales in Japan.
This week’s chart covers 12/11-12/17. As always, you can find the full list here.
While the usual suspects from the past few weeks continue to sell well, an interesting title enters this week’s list at the tenth spot. The newly packaged Pokemon Scarlet/Violet, which includes the paid DLC, The Hidden Treasure of Area Zero, must have been on many folks’ holiday wish-list as its numbers saw a whopping 80% uptick from the week prior. This DLC is also just part one of a two-part DLC, the second and final of which is planned to release on January 11th, 2024, bringing the story to a close and likely the reason for this bundle’s rise into the top ten this week.
Most of the titles on this week’s list also saw an uptick of 20%-30% from last week, save for Dragon Quest Monsters: The Dark Prince, which saw a considerable dip of 30%. Beyond that, the Switch continues to dominate the boxed sales market with every entry on this week’s list being Nintendo exclusives.
Here’s the full Famitsu software sales chart for this week:
- Super Mario Bros. Wonder (Switch): 94,682 (total 1,327,663)
- Momotaro Dentetsu World (Switch): 62,617 (total 603,061)
- Dragon Quest Monsters: The Dark Prince (Switch): 35,161 (total 433,442)
- Pikman 4 (Switch): 5,980 (total 1,040,438)
- Super Mario RPG (Switch): 17,355 (total 414,191)
- Minecraft (Switch): 16,983 (total 3,355,750)
- WarioWare: Move It! (Switch): 16,584 (total 104,507)
- Mario Kart 8 Deluxe (Switch): 16,405 (total 5,585,146)
- Super Smash Bros. Ultimate (Switch): 14,724 (total 5,362,270)
- Pokemon Scarlet/Violet + The Hidden Treasure of Area Zero (Switch): 13,516 (total 41,222)
Additionally, the list for hardware sales is as follows (console families are grouped together for simplicity):
NSW: 94,643
PS5: 42,316
XBS: 1,479
PS4: 2,430
3DS: 19
Surprisingly, the Xbox Series X|S has been outsold by Sony’s last generation console, the PlayStation 4, this week. Xbox consoles have historically struggled to sell well in Japan, but to see Microsoft’s console only selling marginally more each week than a system that released a decade ago, or outright being beaten by it, is quite jarring. Whether it be due to the lack of Japanese-centric titles historically being unavailable on the hardware like a Final Fantasy, or merely a cultural barrier that Microsoft have yet to penetrate for the past decades I’m not sure, but it doesn’t look like things will be changing anytime soon.
Have you bought any of these titles from Famitsu’s chart? Let us know in the comments below!
