We know how Nintendo Switch you continue to remain at the top of the Japanese rankings for countless weeks now, and how not even the arrival of PS5 (albeit severely penalized by the production crisis in recent months) has managed to remove the scepter from the hybrid console in the Land of the Rising Sun.
Thanks to the numbers released by Famitsu in its annual report on hardware and software results, let’s find out how the domination of the large N in Japan has now persisted for 18 consecutive years. This year alone, 9 out of 10 games in the top 10 bear the Nintendo Switch brand, with the hybrid console naturally confirming itself as the best-selling platform ever in the last 12 months.
Nintendo dominates the software charts in retail format every year in Japan dal 2004which was the last year that the company fell short of the majority of top 10 games. That year, the PS2 it bested the Game Boy Advance and Nintendo GameCube (eight of the top ten games in 2004 were on the Sony platform). Since then, the majority of the top ten best-selling games in Japan each year have been for Nintendo platforms, according to data from Famitsu.
Since 2004, the best-selling annual game in Japan has been for one non-Nintendo platform only twice (Dragon Quest VIII in 2004 and Monster Hunter Portable 2nd G in 2008). 13 of the last 19 annual best sellers were instead published by the Kyoto house.
This year Pokémon Scarlet and Violet had the upper hand, breaking all records for Nintendo and the series to which they belong. Elden Ring in the PS4 version managed to enter the top 10, finishing in tenth place.
On the hardware front, in only one of the last 18 years has a non-Nintendo console made it to the top in Japan: PSP in 2010. Every other year Nintendo DS, 3ds o Switch they have been the most successful piece of hardware. This year, Switch has sold more than three times every other console combinedwith total sales of over 4.8 million, bringing its total installed base in Japan to over 27.7 million units.
