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?
The popularity of Pokémon us unveliabable, never has a game been so big, a extremely posivite word of mouth moved the game in 1996, by the end over 1.6m of units had been sold, things only got bigger in 1997 with the introduction of the anime, 4m units sold in a year is unheard of, not to mention that Pokémon Red / Green / Blue are the only game to be the best selling in two consecutive years, on record that is. With over 5.6m units sold is also the second all time best selling game in Japan, just 1.2m behind the original Super Mario Bros.
Its crazy to think that it can actually get bigger as the Pokémon sequel is slated to release next year, alongside a movie.
Nintendo has found great success with this game, it revitalize the Game Boy hardware and software sales of the system are doing great.
On the other side of the spectrum however Nintendo is not doing so well, the Nintendo 64 is doing pretty bad against its competitors, Sony's PlayStation and Sega's Sega Saturn, both are easily outpacing the cartridge based system in software and hardware sales, more importantly those systems are contantly getting games, Nintendo 64 releases are few a far between, not to mention very expensive. Nintendo plans to release an add on for the system sometimes soon, they call it the Nintendo 64 Disk Drive, they have a lot of games planned for it, but they sort of need those games now, not in the future and development of that system seems to be slowing that down.
Mario Kart 64 and Mario 64 have kept good pace, but aren't selling nearly as well as its predecesors, and nothing else is really doing all that, at least it has a more solid lineup next year, the next Zelda is supposed to be out, along with the rumored first Pokémon spin offs, a Pokémon game anywhere at this point is bound to be a success, so Nintendo better play smart.
The PlayStation on the other hand couldn't be doing better, it's selling at the pace the original Famicom did and getting even more software than it, everyone is jumping into the PlayStation train and are founding great success either, Squaresoft will tell you that, their flagship title, Final Fantasy VII was a smash hit, it became the best selling game on the console the day it came out, and the best selling game on its series in just 3 weeks, along with it and some other titles this was the biggest year for Squaresoft and the PlayStation yet, things are bound to get even bigger in 1998, the bigggest games on the system pre-FFVII, Resident Evil and Tekken 2 are both getting new iterations next year, Squaresoft also plans to release more titles and even Sony's own games like Gran Turismo and Parappa The Rapper are doing great, the future looks very bright for PlayStation.
For Sega however, not so much, while the Saturn is doing great in Japan, its a complete flop everywhere else, the company changed from having biggest marketshare in the west to the smallest in less than 2 years, rumors say that they're already planning a successor to the Saturn to be introduced as early as next year, the game's also missing all the big Japanese titles, games like Tekken, Resident Evil or Final Fantasy either aren't on the system at all or were released way too late, many expected Virtua Fighter 3 to be the Saturn's big holiday game, but it was nowhere to be found, development of other expected titles such as Yu Suzuki's own Virtua Fighter RPG, or the long awaited Sonic The Hedhehog title are now uncertain.
Rumors go both ways though, Enix is supposedly undecided on where Dragon Quest VII (or Dragon Warriors V) will be released, it was originally a N64 title but with how things are now that is unlikely to be the case, development on PlayStation seems like a no brainer but Enix and Nintendo are very strong partners, and even lately they've become big partners with Sega too, they just teamed up with them for a soccer themed RPG that did pretty well, who knows at this point.
The Super Famicom is finally being put to rest, it had a great run but its time to move on, there are next to no releases for the system schedule for next year.
Breakdown by system.
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.
Squaresoft was the king of Japan in 1997, Ninendo decade long grip on software was broken, if anything 1997 is the worst year yet for the publisher in terms of software sales, take Pokémon out of the equation and the moved less than 3m units. SCE is finding great success, the publisher is both funding local Japanese games and localizing western games their software output is very impressive.
Sega and Sony show how to support a platform.
NOTE: This incldues all SKUs released by the publisher, including stuff like PlayStation The Best, Saturn Collection kind of rereleases and whatnot.
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
