Today Media Create published its weekly analysis of the Japanese market between December 4th and December 10th, and it included an interesting piece of data.
The limited edition PS4 Pro “Rathalos Edition” has sold 33,000 units in its debut week, after hitting the local shelves on December 7th. This accounts for the vast majority of PS4 Pro units sold during the week, which actually overtook the base CUH-2000 model with 45,163 total sales versus 40, 524, for a combined bounty for Sony’s family of home consoles of 85,687.
The success of Monster Hunter World‘s custom-painted PS4 Pro is interesting since the game won’t be sold until January 26th (the console does include a download code for it, but it’ll unlock only on release date). According to Media Create, this is partly due to the recent beta test.
The Rathalos Edition will probably remain a Japanese exclusive, so if you want to see what it looks like, you can check out some official pictures, and more of the real thing that I shot myself at Tokyo Game Show.
While the performance of the Rathalos Edition is definitely a one-off circumstance, this is a large departure from the usual proportions, that see the standard PS4 slim largely outsell PS4 Pro thanks to the considerably lower price.
That being said, it’ll be interesting to see whether the appearance of a popular and graphically advanced Japanese game like Monster Hunter World will manage to convince more Japanese gamers to opt for the Pro version of the PS4 on the medium term. Final Fantasy XV‘s launch last year didn’t have much of an effect, but Monster Hunter is Monster Hunter.
While PS4 sales were up across the board week-on-week thanks to the Holiday shopping season and the solid performance of Yakuza Kiwami 2 and Earth Defense Force 5 (ranked respectively 1st and 2nd with 131, 931 units and 111,075 units sold) this still was not enough to catch up with the Switch, that is booming thanks to regular shipments finally hitting the local shelves, with 164,908 units sold during the past week.