This Week In Sales: Mario Tennis Aces Serves A Smashing Debut

Period: The week of June 18 – June 24 (2018)

Top-seller: Mario Tennis Aces – 123,774 (Switch)

Nintendo Switch sales: 48,944 (Last week – 48,062)

Nintendo 2DS sales: 389 (475)

New Nintendo 2DS LL sales: 3,796 (3,862)

New Nintendo 3DS LL sales: 2,627 (2,715)

PlayStation 4 sales: 15,036 (19,090)

PlayStation 4 Pro sales: 5,259 (6,048)

PlayStation Vita sales: 2,163 (3,099)

Xbox One sales: 38 (53)

Xbox One X sales: 509 (733)

<< Last week’s software sales chart

<< How to read and understand sale

Last week, Japan saw the release of three big titles with Mario Tennis Aces for Switch, New Gundam Breaker for PlayStation 4, and a physical version of Minecraft on Switch. Japanese sales tracker Media Create released the latest video game software and hardware sales data from the week of June 18 through June 24, 2018.

The top spot of the week goes to Mario Tennis Aces which saw a smashing debut with 123,774 units sold for Switch to take #1. The previous Mario Tennis game, Mario Tennis: Ultra Smash sold 55,331 units on the Wii U back in January 2016. Before that it was Mario Tennis Open which sold 101,645 copies for 3DS in its debut in May 2012.

New Gundam Breaker sold 63,790 units on PS4 to chart at #2. The last major Gundam game was Gundam Versus which sold 121,444 units on PS4 back in July 2017. Here’s how the previous Gundam Breaker games sold in their debuts for comparison:

• [2013] Gundam Breaker – 200,564 (PS3)
• [2014] Gundam Breaker 2 – 123,720 (66,532 – PS3|57,188 – PSV)
• [2016] Gundam Breaker 3 – 141,219 (74,639 – PSV|66,580 – PS4)

Things haven’t look good for New Gundam Breaker since its beta which saw mostly negative scores on the PS Store page and plenty of criticism across the net. The game’s Amazon rating currently sits at 1.5 stars out of 5 from 208 customer reviews. However, keep in mind that it only released on one platform so far in Japan, so if you look at it that way it sold about as much as the PS4 version of Gundam Breaker 3 did a couple years ago.

The #3 game of the week is Minecraft’s retail release for Nintendo Switch, which sold 61,764 copies in its debut. If you’ve kept up with the weekly sales for a while,  you might remember how long Minecraft: PlayStation Vita Version stayed in the Japanese sales chart. If you don’t, well it stuck around for well past the handheld console’s prime and they even made a sweet limited edition PS Vita for it. The game’s digital version has been selling well on eShop since its launch, and we can expect to see the physical Switch version stay and make itself comfortable in the top-20 for weeks or months to come.

At #4 we have last week’s top in Splatoon 2 with 14,747 units. You can bet to see it back in the top-3 in the near future. Mario Kart 8 Deluxe has also been consistent with 10,296 units sold on Switch to chart at #5. As for any notable titles to make it in the list, we saw the return of two soccer/football games with Pro Evolution Soccer for PS4 at #16 and FIFA 18 for Switch at #20. It’s safe to assume they made it back to the list thanks to the World Cup hype.

In hardware sales, things were mostly the same as the previous week with very little change across all platforms. The PS4 saw the biggest change with about 4,000 less than the previous week. It sold 15,036 units plus an extra 5,259 with the PS4 Pro for a total of 20,295 units sold in the week. The Nintendo Switch was again the top-selling console with 48,944 units sold. Going by Media Create’s figures, the Nintendo Switch is currently at 4,443,555 units sold in Japan since its launch in March 3, 2017.

The top-20 chart of the week is as follows:

Sales data acquired from 4Gamer and Media Create.