The holidays are mostly behind us, and with them is the last big sales push of 2016. As 2016 comes to a close, Media Create reloeased it’s sales figures for the week of Dec 19, 2016 through Christmas, so it’s time to knuckle down and see who was a good little gaming company. We’ve covered these Japanese sales figures before, but following the holidays things can always get exciting.
It can’t really be a surprise to anyone that Nintendo and the Pokémon Company are on top in hardware and software, respectively. Usually, the newest Pokémon game, along with hardware to play on, are common wishlist items since the franchise’s inception back in the 90s. Pokémon Sun and Pokémon Moon sold a combined total of 322,830 units in the run up to the holiday, unseating it’s strong competitor Yo-Kai Watch 3: Sukiyaki in the process. There’s no doubt this helped the New 3DS sales numbers, but that’s not the only reason.
While not selling quite as many units as Pokemon Sun/Moon, the real star of the show seems to be Super Mario Maker for Nintendo 3DS. The mobile port only released at the beginning of the month, and it is quickly approaching one million units sold, selling a total of 315,382 in this week alone. In fact, looking over the software sales, its no wonder that the 3DS dominated is hardware sales. Of this list of the top 30 games sold, 21 of them are 3DS games. The Last Guardian only sold a trivial 11,222 units while Mario Kart 7, a five year old game put out nearly twice that.
With that in mind, it’s no suprise the 3DS and all of it’s alternate models moved out a total of 229,575 units, more than twice the number of sales from it’s closest competitor, the PlayStation 4 and PlayStation 4 Pro, which only managed to get a combined total of 107,269 systems out the door. It was a great week for games of all stripes, but a very merry mobile market.
