Skyrim was released in Japan on February 1st. When it’s released date was announced, I promised that I would keep an eye on its sales and report on it when more data had come in. Now that time has come, and it’s sales according to the NDP weekly reports have been disappointing at best.
In the first week, the game launched to a relatively respectable 13,922 physical units. While these numbers are by no means a blockbuster, it was still decent and put the title at number 7 for the week. In the second week, Skyrim dropped down to just 5,625 units sold and was just number 14 on the sales charts. In the time since, Skyrim hasn’t managed to crack the top 20 games on the Japanese sales charts. It hasn’t fared much better on the eShop. By the conclusion of the first week, Skyrim was at number 5 on the eShop, and by the end of the second week, it was up to number 3. However, much like with its physical sales, it has completely dropped off the top sellers list in the time since and has yet to manage to reclaim a position there.
As I stated on my previous posting regarding this topic, Skyrim has not historically performed well in Japan. On the PS3, it only sold 250,000 copies there, and it only managed 80,000 copies on the PS4. To anyone hoping that the Switch could manage to invigorate the series in Japan, it would appear that is not going to be the case. We don’t have any solid numbers yet regarding its digital sales, but it will be interesting to see if the game can manage to at least catch up to its performance on the PS4 throughout the lifetime of the Switch.
DOOM is another game just recently released in Japan on the Switch which did not perform very well there on the PS4. I will be keeping an eye on that one as well and will let you all know how well it does.
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