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Forums - Sales Discussion - Best-Selling Western Games in Japan (500k+ Sales)

Bofferbrauer2 on 17 November 2020
Salnax said:

Honorable Mentions and Near Misses

  • Tetris was originally developed in Russia, but I feel that the versions of Tetris are too different to be considered a single game. Furthermore, the best-selling versions of Tetris in Japan are all developed by Japanese companies. Still, if you feel that an IP's country of origin is what really matters, Tetris on the Game Boy is #2 on the list above with 4.23 million sales.
  • Super Mario Maker for Nintendo 3DS was ported by the American-based Nintendo Software Technology Corporation. I didn't count the porting of a game as developing it, but if this game is treated as a seperate entity, then it makes it on the list with 1.19 million retail and digital sales.
  • SimCity on the Super Famicom sold a whopping 900,000 copies in Japan alone. However, it is hard to consider it a western game when the port was developed and published by Nintendo under a license from Maxis. Similarly, if we combine the Saturn and Super Famicom versions of SimCity 2000, we end up with about 470,000 sales, an impressive number.
  • A number of entries in series represented in the list above narrowly missed the cut. These include Grand Theft Auto III, Grand Theft Auto IV and Liberty City Stories, Call of Duty: Black Ops III, Call of Duty: WWII, and Call of Duty: Ghosts, Battlefield 1,
  • The Elder Scrolls: Skyrim is the biggest western RPG in Japanese history, with over 400,000 sales.
  • Although FIFA pales in comparison to the Winning Eleven (PES) series in Japan, the 1998 entry for PlayStation, FIFA World Championship, sold about 400,000 copies.

Trivia

  • Of the 24 games with at least 500,000 sales, 11 are from the United States, 8 are from the United Kingdom, 2 are from Canada, 2 are from Sweden, 1 is from France.
  • The games on this list mostly come from two time periods: the first wave, which includes 8 of these games, lasted from 1994 to 1999. Then from 2000 to 2008, only 3 games on this list were released. Then the second wave of 11 games came from 2009 to 2013. We are currently in another relative quiet period for Western games, as the only big games from 2014 to 2020 have been Luigi's Mansion 3 and Black Ops 4.

If you don't count Sim City and Tetris for that reason, then you would need to remove all the Donkey Kong and Luigi games since those are IPs from Japanese developer, and probably Nintendo EAD did have some hand in the development, like some overview or even gameplay/engine (Nintendo has an entire division just for those)

Last edited by Bofferbrauer2 - on 17 November 2020

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Salnax on 26 January 2021

Minor Update: I found some information stating that Donkey Kong Land, known in Japan as "Super Donkey Kong," sold about 1.07 million copies for the Game Boy in Japan. So if you were one of those people lamenting that Donkey Kong only represented a small majority of million-sellers on this list, I have got some good news for you.

The Game Data Library, possibly the best source of Japanese game sales figures in the non-Japanese parts of the internet, is currently undergoing an overhaul. I should be able to give this thread a proper update once that is done.



Love and tolerate.

Endymion on 27 January 2021

Donkey Kong Land shipped in total 1.08 million units in Japan.

Donkey Kong 64 too was a million seller in Japan.

Shipment totals in Japan:

Donkey Kong Country (SNES): 3.00M
Donkey Kong Country 2 (SNES): 2.21M
Donkey Kong Country 3 (SNES): 1.77M
Crash Bandicoot 3 Warped (PS1): 1.45M
Crash Bandicoot 2 (PS1): 1.33M
Luigi's Mansion 2 (3DS): 1.31
Donkey Kong 64 (N64): 1.10M
Donkey Kong Land (GB): 1.08M
Donkey Kong Country Returns (Wii): 1.00M
Luigi's Mansion 3 (NSW): 0.92M (soon to be announced as a million seller)

Last edited by Endymion - on 27 January 2021

Salnax on 27 January 2021
Endymion said:

Donkey Kong Land shipped in total 1.08 million units in Japan.

Donkey Kong 64 too was a million seller in Japan.

Shipment totals in Japan:

Donkey Kong Country (SNES): 3.00M
Donkey Kong Country 2 (SNES): 2.21M
Donkey Kong Country 3 (SNES): 1.77M
Crash Bandicoot 3 Warped (PS1): 1.45M
Crash Bandicoot 2 (PS1): 1.33M
Luigi's Mansion 2 (3DS): 1.31
Donkey Kong 64 (N64): 1.10M
Donkey Kong Land (GB): 1.08M
Donkey Kong Country Returns (Wii): 1.00M
Luigi's Mansion 3 (NSW): 0.92M (soon to be announced as a million seller)

Can you share your source?



Love and tolerate.

Jumpin on 28 January 2021
konnichiwa said:

Western = not japanese? And where are the mobile games?

It looks like the original post uses West as a euphemism "foreign" regarding Japan.
But West typically refers to the blue area on this map.


Last edited by Jumpin - on 28 January 2021

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TruckOSaurus on 28 January 2021
Jumpin said:
konnichiwa said:

Western = not japanese? And where are the mobile games?

It looks like the original post uses West as a euphemism "foreign" regarding Japan.
But West typically refers to the blue area on this map.

So you're saying "West" is not a geographical term but is instead defined by the average income per capita of the country?

Last edited by TruckOSaurus - on 28 January 2021

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Chicho on 28 January 2021

wait i thought Greece and Croatia were considered part of the west.



Salnax on 28 January 2021
Chicho said:

wait i thought Greece and Croatia were considered part of the west.

They are. I think Jumpin is just using an economic map to illustrate a broad difference between what is tradionally western vs eastern Europe.

Note that for this thread, all of Europe counts as Western.



Love and tolerate.

Jumpin on 29 January 2021
Chicho said

wait i thought Greece and Croatia were considered part of the west.

Greece had its chance!

On a serious note. There are many definitions of East and West depending on purpose and/or time in history. Sometimes Croatia and Greece are associated with the West, and sometimes with the East. I think if we stick to two geographic halves, Greece (at least) is in the East. They would also be Eastern considering Greek is a geographically Eastern culture, it fell into the Byzantine Empire, and religiously Eastern (Croatia would fall Western in this case). Ancient Greece was the first significant nation of European culture (unless you include the Hittites, which were technically the first major Euro-culture civilization) - but the Greek world is the birthplace of both Eastern and Western European civilization as we know it (although some will say the Minoans and Nuragic civilizations, but neither are technically Indo-European, but IMO that doesn't matter as some modern European cultures are not Indo-European either; and Indo European also includes Iranian and Indian, which are not European)

The important thing is no one has been passed back and forth more than Poland.

Last edited by Jumpin - on 29 January 2021

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VGChartz_gamrConnect on 05 February 2021

does the sale inculding digital