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Wii Sports Named Best Selling Game Of 2007 In Japan
by David Jenkins
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January 11, 2008
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Data from Japanese research firm and Famitsu magazine publisher Enterbrain shows that Wii Sport (packaged separately from the hardware in Japan) was the best selling video game of 2007 in Japan, with all but one of the top selling tiles being for Nintendo formats.
In data published in the West by UK trade paper MCV, Wii Sports sold 1,911,520 units during the year. Although the collection of five sporting mini-games is bundled with the hardware in the West it is sold as a normal stand alone game in Japan.
The second highest selling game of the year was the only non-Nintendo format game in the list: Capcom’s Monster Hunter Freedom 2 for the PSP. The game sold an impressive 1,489,898 units during the last twelve months. Together with Crisis Core: Final Fantasy VII, the Monster Hunter games continue to be the only titles in Japan to bridge the large gap between the very high PSP hardware sales and generally very low software sales.
The third best selling game of the year was Wii Play on 1,487,484 units, while the best selling Nintendo DS title was Pokemon Mystery Dungeon on 1,256,516 (this figure likely includes the near identical Game Boy Advance version, although this is not specified in the data).
Despite only being released in November the fifth best seller was Mario Party DS on 1,232,644 units. The game is once again the number one seller in the weekly Japanese charts created by rival firm Media Create – with whom Enterbrain’s monthly figures usually broadly agree.
New Super Mario Bros. on Nintendo DS was the sixth best seller on 1,176,939 units, followed by combined sales of Pokemon Diamond/Pearl on 1,094,389 units. At number eight was Mario Party 8 on 1,053,934 units, with Square Enix’s Dragon Quest IV being the only third party Nintendo format game in the top ten with 1,025,827 units sold. The list is rounded out by More Brain Training (aka Brain Age 2) at 1,033,933 units.
In other data released by Enterbrain/MCV the total value of the Japanese market was put at ¥687.66 billion ($6.31bn), up 9.9 percent on the previous year. Total software sales were down 1 percent on 2006 to ¥360.25 billion ($3.30bn), but hardware sales were up 25 percent to ¥327.41 billion ($3.00bn).
Enterbrain’s data calculates 7,143,702 unit sales for the Nintendo DS hardware during 2007, for a lifetime total in Japan of 21,105,472. The Wii was the second best selling console on 3,629,361 units, with a lifetime total of 4,618,479 – already more than the GameCube.
PSP sales were also extremely strong in 2007, with a total of 3,022,659 units sold and a lifetime figure of 7,535,313. PlayStation 3 sales were 1,206,347 with a lifetime total of 1,673,063, while the Xbox 360 recorded only 257,841 unit sales for a lifetime total of 548,308.
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