Japanese Charts: Mario Kart World Gets Back To Demolishing The Competition

With still so many Switch 1 games scheduled to be released, Switch 1 still has plenty of life left for this year and the next.

I find it amazing that Switch 2 has already managed to reach nearly 27% of PS5 (all types) sales in such a short time!

Nintendo just continues to dominate the Japanese charts!

@Erigen It does have plenty of life left in it... I expect sales to continue to slowly decrease of the console but game releases will continue well into 2026. Nintendo is supporting it with a couple of titles into 2026 itself. Expect RPG'S and niche titles, to release on Switch well into 2027, especially in Japan, too.

@JohnnyMind headsup this chart covers 2 weeks as it was a national holiday in Japan last week.

Superb numbers 🙌

PS5 was on number 4 with more than 10K unit sold.
Not bad.
PS4 also still selling with 32 units.

Switch 2 sales are higher again, with an average of 90k sales for the last two weeks.

Edit: Just ordered the Japanese version of Fantasy Life i for the PlayStation 5.

10 thousand over TWO weeks for PS5 is terrible! Switch 2 doing great and Switch 1 combo doing well still too!

MKW numbers are misleading though because most of those sales could be from the bundle.

@somnambulance it’s even higher when you take into consideration this is physical only.

@Anti-Matter PS5 is becoming irrelevant in Japan and the PS6 will do worse. Sony has lost the Japanese market and they have no one to blame but themselves.with Final Fantasy coming to the Switch 2 and other consoles the same day will continue to hurt the PS brand.

10k in two weeks is horrible. That's like saying poor people left on the Titanic saying, "At least the rich people made it out alive."

@Johnny44 yes and no. If people didn't want to buy MKW then the console only SKU is available for them so it's not that misleading like say WiiSports pack in numbers. It would be good to know what percentage of these MKW sales are bundle sales. I can imagine some people have gone the more expensive route to get the physical copy of the game. I'd be interested to know how many. Long live physical!

EDIT: wait these are physical only so does that mean pack in download codes for MKW don't count?! In that case holy mackerel MKW is absolutely killing it in JP.

@michellelynn0976 while I agree I’m not sure the PS6 gen will do as badly if the rumoured handheld comes to fruition.

Sony would do well to go handheld for the Japanese market especially so could see it beating the ps5 quite easily.

@WheresWaveRace Fair point. I got the bundle simply because MKW cost me 40 Euro that way. No way I would have paid 90 for it.

But if digital codes aren’t counted then the figures don’t make sense either because if 179 thousand Switch 2 units were sold and almost 145 thousand MKW sales…..why on earth wouldn’t these people just get the bundle? Seems very unlikely that they all wanted a physical copy that badly!

I had a dream last night that a bunch of DLC tracks for Mario Kart World leaked. One of them was just called "Ohio." 💀

Couple of things.
1) It would be interesting to see the split between full fat and region locked SKUs. Kinda odd they don't differentiate.
2) Where are the key-cards? Not a single one in the charts. Hopefully this is a strong signal to publishers outside of Nintendo.
3) Coming into the business end of the year and blimey, if sales are this high already, Q3 is going to historical!

...and still there are people saying DK Bonanza should have been the launch game. No! Mario Kart is Nintendo's biggest series, and here is further evidence of its popularity. MKW had more than double the sales over DK for this period, and that's just physical copies. Note: At almost 1.6 million MKW sold vs 1.856 of the Switch 2 itself, they must be counting the bundle with a code of MKW as a physical product. I can't imagine the bundle selling so poorly in deference to buying the console and game separately.

@Johnny44 It's not "misleading" in any sense. The bundle includes the game at a discount, but it's not a free pack in, so sales of the bundle SHOULD count as game sales as well as console sales. It's not like the game comes free with the console like Wii Sports did.

Weird as the comment section here is always saying this game is “dead” and “boring” and generally “not good”.

@MamaSymphonia Yes but my point is people are getting the game at a heavy discount. Many of these, myself included, wouldn’t have bought it at full price. So to me those sales are slightly misleading. If someone is remotely interested in MKW then it’s a no-brainer to get it in the bundle.

@Johnny44 They're counting sales, not revenue. You might argue that that's not as accurate, but that's what they're counting and accurately reporting.

@MamaSymphonia Yes, I see your point. My only issue is Nintendo could later claim “oh look, two million bought the game so nobody thinks the price was too high”….when the truth would be “well, many bought the bundle exactly because the price was too high”.

@Johnny44 yeh that doesn't make sense. My guess is these are in store retail numbers - which people interchange for physical sales - which includes physical, code-in-box and now GCK. So in that case code-in-console-box would count. Otherwise it's completely bonkers.

Great to see Switch and Switch 2 doing so well - but I think Nintendo will be disappointed with Donkey Kong Bananza’s sales to date. Compared to the launch of DK Country Returns on Wii (over 160k sakes in first week in Japan alone), not to mention initial sales of Mario or Zelda games, it is doing ‘okay’ but not ‘great’. And for a game with great reviews, and such a strong development team, I’m sure Nintendo wanted better than ‘okay’ sales! So I’m not sure why DK Bananza isn’t doing better?

@GrailUK To (try to) answer your question 2. Capcom has said they record Game-Key Card sales as digital ones, so I assume other publishers do the same.

However given that these weekly charts are tracked by Famitsu and not publishers themselves, I believe there is some credibility to the idea that people aren't buying them. Unless Famitsu also acknowledges them as digital sales.

For how many weeks has the Switch 2 been available? It's surreal that on each of those weeks Mario Kart World and Mario Kart 8 Deluxe were in the top 10, and counting.

so great to see nintendo dominating once again!!! wow those numbers for bananza are so impressive, im glad DK got the comeback he deserved

There probably were other chart entries, but MKW sensed that they released too hard and promptly went full Ayrton Senna to wipe them out.

Feeling sorry for all those MKW buyers.

@HammerGalladeBro I do applaud the idea of digital with a higher degree of ownership. It’s no replacement to true physical. Would be good to get greater insight into how they are tracked but I dare say you are right 😀

@Ogbert NL comment section on their hot takes for a game isn’t exactly a reliable source of information. The game wouldn’t still be being bought and played in droves if it was objectively any of those things.

Some days I feel like an xbox fan in Japan.

@Anti-Matter you’re right it’s not bad, saying they’re bad would be the understatement of the year, PS5 sales are an absolute trainwreck. Base PS5, by far the most sold sku, barely managed 10k over 2 weeks, and the entire PS5 family sold roughly 40% of Switch 1 family over the same period. That’s absolutely tragic. What’s even worse is that software is not selling at all on PS5. It’s a very dire situation and it will only get worse into 2026.

@datamonkey That's true. I guess we'll have to wait and see what Sony does.