This Week In Sales: Yakuza 6 Pummels Its Way To The Top

Period: The week of December 5th – December 11th (2016)

Top-seller: Yakuza 6 – 218,168 (PS4)

Nintendo 3DS sales: 314

Nintendo 3DS LL sales: 88

Nintendo 2DS – 33,439

New Nintendo 3DS sales: 7,887

New Nintendo 3DS LL sales: 67,247

PlayStation Vita sales: 22,314

Wii U sales: 4,656

PlayStation 4 sales: 85,218

PlayStation 4 Pro: 7,499

PlayStation 3 sales: 853

Xbox One sales: 1,245

<< Last week’s software sales chart

<< How to read and understand sales

Last week, Japan saw another week of big releases with a couple of highly anticipated titles in Yakuza 6: The Song of Life and The Last Guardian, as well as Miitopia, Puyo Puyo Chronicle, and more. Here’s the latest from Japanese sales tracker, Media Create, with a look at software and hardware sales data from the week of December 5 through December 11, 2016.

#1 for the week goes to Sega’s latest hit in Yakuza 6: The Song of Life which sold 218,168 copies in its debuting week for PlayStation 4. It’s also the series’ first title that is exclusively on the PS4 after we saw the two previous titles in Yakuza Ishin and Yakuza 0 share platforms on PS4 and PS3.

That said, here’s a look at how Yakuza 6 stacks against other titles from the series:

• (2010) Yakuza 4 – 383,972 (PS3)
• (2011) Yakuza: Dead Souls – 307,019 (PS3)
• (2012) Yakuza 5 – 356,757 (PS3)
• (2014) Yakuza Ishin/Yakuza Restoration – 220,698 (PS4/PS3)
• (2015) Yakuza 0 – 236,329 (PS4/PS3)
• (2016) Yakuza 6 – 218,168 (PS4)

As you can see, there’s been a drop in the series over the years, with the latest main-numbered title from the series failing to go over the 300,000 mark. While the first-week sales are indeed getting lower, let’s not forget that console game sales in Japan have overall dropped in recent years, as we saw with Final Fantasy XV and other high profile titles the past couple years.

Nonetheless, these are still pretty low numbers for a Yakuza game, as  saw a sell-through rate of 60.50% in its debut. Looking back at the previous main-numbered title, Yakuza 5,  which released in December 12, 2012 exclusively for PS3, it had a sell-through rate of 65.80%. Yakuza 0 saw a sell-through of 66.22% on PS3 and 67.68% on PS4, so the decline is certainly there for Yakuza 6.

Before looking at the next new title on the list, it should be noted that Pokémon Sun & Moon are still going strong with 190,101 copies sold, and Super Mario Maker for Nintendo 3DS has also been a nice surprise after seeing it sell 117,907 copies in its second week. They respectively finished at #2 and #3 for the week.

Back to the new titles, #4 goes to the GenDesign and SIE Japan Studio-developed action-adventure game, The Last Guardian, which sold 82,260 copies in its first week in Japan. The Tomodachi Life with an RPG twist in Miitopia debuted at #6 with 27,090 units sold in its first week.

Puyo Puyo Chronicle is the series’ latest title on Nintendo 3DS, and it also adds a new RPG twist to the traditional puzzler. However, it didn’t do nearly as well as we saw in Puyo Puyo Tetris, which sold 44,627 copies for 3DS, 10,306 on PS3, and 8,973 on PS Vita for a total of 63,906 across all three platforms.

Kunio-kun Nekketsu Complete Famicom Series brought back some nostalgia to take #14 with 8,266 copies sold on 3DS. And finally, Touhou Shinpiroku: Urban Legend in Limbo finished #17 with its 6,058 copies sold on PS4 for its debut.

As far as hardware goes, the PlayStation 4 dropped a bit from its massive 110,318 units sold in the previous week (mostly thanks to Final Fantasy XV) but it is still maintaining a healthy 85,218 for the following week. The release of anticipated titles such as Yakuza 6 and The Last Guardian likely provided a nice boost. Speaking of boosts, the Nintendo 2DS also saw a big jump going from 17,623 units to 33,439 units. However, the Xbox One saw the biggest jump in %, going from 256 units to 1,245 units.

The top-20 chart for the week was as follows:

Sales data acquired from 4Gamer and Media Create.