Some of you might remember, or just realize, that I used to make some soft of sales thread once per week, I stopped that some time ago, not that much interested and was running out of topics.
This might be a return to that, but with a running theme. Laltely I've been sharing some of my old Famitsu data here, so I figured why not actually make threads about it and share it with everyone, should be interesting to see how the market evolves in 20 years.
The data I have goes as far as late 1994, about 5 weeks of that one, so we won't discuss that one, as for 1995, well I'm missing over half of that year, so its not fair either, due to this our journey goes as far back as 1996, and we'll go out week per year until 2014, or until I see there's not enough interesting to keep going.
Ready?
1996 was this magical time in which consoles ruled, the Super Famicom was dying out while the PlayStation and the Sega Saturn were starting to pick up the pace, in the middle of the year Nintendo also released their newest console, the Nintendo 64, which didn't really do all that. There's also the Neo Geo and the PC-FX, but whatever.
By the mid 90's the handheld market had started to shrink, the Game Boy had been pretty much unrivaled through its whole lifetime and had reach the point of saturation, hardware wasn't really moving, and there wasn't much software coming to the system either, given that its crazy to think that what would become the region's biggest franchise would release on the system, especially as late as 1996, when a susccessor to the system was expected, nonetheless Pokemon Red / Green became a smash hit selling over 1m units (Blue accounts for about 600k of that 1.6m), it took everyone by surprise hence the lack of more Game Boy software there, but the system would get a second life on the upcoming years.
Fighters also keep enjoying their popularity, Namco's Tekken 2 was the best selling game for most of the year, while there aren't any other on the chart, the likes of Street Fighter Alpha and Alpha 2 as well as Darkstarlkers and a slew of Virtua Fighter games all sold well, the Sega Saturn seems to be the platform of choice for fighting game fans, well, the most popular game of the time, Virtua Fighter 2, is exclusive to the system.
The Super Famicom enjoyed a last great year having half of the top 10, however developers are quickly moving on, and with even Nintendo doing so, don't expect any SFC on the chart come 1997, speaking of the N64, it had a less than spectacular launch, with less than 10 games being releasd during its first 6 months, its had a very slow start and things aren't looking good; Konami, Capcom and the like are enjoying great success on the Saturn and PlayStation they might not look back.
1996 is a transition year as the SFC still hasn't been fased out, it won't be until 1997 when the 6th gen machines truly take off, the year's biggest game, Final Fantasy VII (I guess they'll call it IV in the west) is releasing in January and only on the PlayStation, Resident Evil is definetly getting a sequel probably Capcom might actually release Street Fighter III, Saturn isn't looking quite as good as big releases are concerned, but its living off its niche market so it should keep going with that, things are though for the Nintendo 64 though, will be interesting what Nintendo is planning.
Onto breakdown by system.
If the game is there twice is because one if the regular cartridge release and the other one is the CD release.
Only games that entered Famitsu's top 30, not total games released for the system in 1996!
PS1 is going to be the next gen machine of preference with nearly 200 games released in its second full year, not even the SFC got that many on the same time frame.
Note that this data had to be added manually from all games that entered top 30, actual number is higher, ranking isn't wrong though.
For over 10 years Nintendo remains the software king in Japan, their dominance may or may not be at an end seeing how their system is no longer the market leader but we'll see.
Hardware analysis will begin in 1999 (if we get that far) as the data I have starts in late 1998 to have a fair comparison, but you can just know based on software sales that it was the PlayStation the one that sold the most.
So yeah :T
