Top 10 best-selling video games in Japan – February 2022

Despite Elden Ring selling extremely well, Pokemon Legends: Arceus managed to remain the best-selling title in Japan for two months in a row.

According to Famitsu’s monthly physical sales charts, Pokemon Legends: Arceus managed to sell more than 645 000 copies which is more than double that when compared to Elden Ring which sold around 279 000 units.

This means that Pokemon Legends: Arceus managed to sell more than 2 million copies with 1.5 million being sold during January when the game was released.

Pokemon Legends: Arceus accounted for more than a third of all Switch games sold this month and, thanks to the release of Brilliant Diamond and Shining Pearl in November, this marks the fourth month in a row with a Pokemon title at No.1.

Since Nintendo doesn’t share the data on their digital sales, we can’t say for sure whether Elden Ring managed to sell better overall.

Elden Ring majority sales were accounted for by the PS4 version of the game, managing to sell 188 000 copies while the PS5 version managed to sell around 90 000 units. The Xbox version of the game didn’t even chart in the top 30, which is to be expected considering the low install base of Microsoft’s consoles in Japan.

Out of all sales, Nintendo Switch games accounted for more than 72% while PS4 and PS5 units accounted for 19.1% and 8.6% respectively.

Monthly physical software sales suffered a 41% decline despite the major releases such as Elden Ring, Horizon: Forbidden West, Dying Light 2: Stay Human and Atelier Sophie 2 charting among the top 20.

Nintendo Switch remains the best-selling hardware managing to sell 81% of all units. The OLED model accounted for 43.1% of the sales while the standard edition and Switch Lite accounted for 24.4% and 13.5% respectively.

PlayStation 5 accounted for 14% of console sales with the disc drive version being the best-seller accounting for 12.8% of the market total. The digital edition of PS5 accounted for only 1.3% of all console sales in Japan last month.

Surprisingly, the Xbox Series S digital edition managed to outsell the Xbox Series X with the former accounting for 2.8% of the entire market and the latter accounting for 1.7%.

Overall hardware sales declined by 36.5% when compared to January 2022.

Below are the top ten best-selling video games in Japan in February 2022: