Anthem Tops Latest Media Create Charts With Almost 80,000 Units Sold

Media Create has released its latest weekly charts for video game software and hardware sales in Japan, and the results are honestly quite surprising. For the week ending February 24, BioWare’s recently released looter shooter Anthem has topped the charts with three days on the market, selling nearly 80,000 units. That’s surprising, because Japan isn’t usually a market where looter shooters (or BioWare/EA titles) do exceptionally well. In comparison, Jump Force, a game pretty much tailor made for Japanese audiences, sold less on its debut last week than Anthem has done this week. Jump Force, meanwhile, is down to fifth place, with over 17,000 units sold this week.

Anthem, incidentally, also topped UK sales charts, but in spite of that, it performed quite poorly, selling half as much as Mass Effect Andromeda did at launch, and managing only 10% of the sales that Destiny did back when it came out in 2014. The fact that it has managed to sell better in Japan than in UK is somewhat surprising. Then again, Japan is a market that gravitates towards physical copies- much more so than the UK, at any rate, and the UK charts didn’t include digital sales, so we don’t exactly have the full picture here.

Meanwhile, the recently released NieR: Automata – Game of the YoRHa Edition also enjoyed a good debut, ranking fourth in the charts with over 21,000 copies sold. Ace Attorney Trilogy – which is out now in Japan and will be coming West soon as well – managed to sell less than 4,000 copies in a poor showing, debuting at eighteenth place. The likes of Super Smash Bros. Ultimate, New Super Mario Bros. U Deluxe, and Kingdom Hearts 3 all continued to perform well.

On the hardware front, not much has changed. The Switch is still the highest selling console, in spite of a drop of roughly 12,000 units in sales as compared to last week, with over 53,000 units sold this week. The PS4, meanwhile, is holding steady at around 17,000 units sold (base model and PS4 Pro sales combined).

You can check out the full hardware and software charts below.

Software Sales (followed by lifetime sales)

1. [PS4] Anthem (Limited Edition Included) (Electronic Arts, 02/22/19) – 77,938 (New)
2. [NSW] New Super Mario Bros. U Deluxe (Nintendo, 01/11/19) – 23,235 (455,006)
3. [NSW] Super Smash Bros. Ultimate (Nintendo, 12/07/18) – 22,430 (2,883,416)
4. [PS4] NieR: Automata Game of the YoRHa Edition (Square Enix, 02/21/19) – 21,326 (New)
5. [PS4] Jump Force (Bandai Namco, 02/14/19) – 17,471 (94,365)
6. [PS4] Kingdom Hearts III (Limited Edition Included) (Square Enix, 01/25/19) – 14,258 (770,068)
7. [PS4] Far Cry: New Dawn (Ubisoft, 02/15/19) – 12,384 (38,668)
8. [NSW] Pokemon: Let’s Go, Pikachu! / Let’s Go, Eevee! (Bundle Editions Included) (Nintendo, 11/16/18) – 11,057 (1,501,846)
9. [NSW] Mario Kart 8 Deluxe (Nintendo, 04/28/17) – 9,308 (2,142,329)
10. [NSW] Super Mario Party (Bundle Version Included) (Nintendo, 10/05/18) – 8,770 (1,027,695)
11. [NSW] Minecraft: Nintendo Switch Edition (Bundle Version Included) (Microsoft, 06/21/18) – 8,380 (615,882)
12. [NSW] The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild (Limited Edition Included) (Nintendo, 03/03/17) – 7,748 (1,299,813)
13. [NSW] Girls und Panzer: Dream Tank Match DX (Bandai Namco, 02/21/19) – 7,651 (New)
14. [PS4] Catherine: Full Body (Limited Edition Included) (Atlus, 02/14/19) – 7,031 (58,855)
15. [NSW] Splatoon 2 (Bundle Version Included) (Nintendo, 07/21/17) – 5,962 (2,938,590)
16. [PS4] Resident Evil 2 (Z Version and Limited Edition Included) (Capcom, 01/25/19) – 5,781 (344,273)
17. [PS4] Metro Exodus (Spike Chunsoft, 02/15/19) – 5,187 (22,701)
18. [NSW] Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney Trilogy (Capcom, 02/21/19) – 4,419 (New)
19. [PS4] Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney Trilogy (Capcom, 02/21/19) – 3,783 (New)
20. [NSW] Super Mario Odyssey (Limited Edition and Bundle Versions Included) (Nintendo, 10/27/17) – 2,724 (1,954,432)

Hardware Sales (followed by last week’s sales)

1. Switch – 53,270 (65,958)
2. PlayStation 4 – 10,632 (11,792)
3. PlayStation 4 Pro – 6,956 (7,892)
4. PlayStation Vita – 3,600 (1,767)
5. New 2DS LL – 3,388 (3,358)
6. New 3DS LL – 1,052 (1,254)
7. 2DS – 113 (142)
8. Xbox One X – 51 (55)
9. Xbox One – 21 (13)

[Gematsu]