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?
Pokémon Red/Green/Blue had started to lose steam after the holidays, after selling 5.6m units there's not that many people left to sell the game to, the games finally left Famitsu's top 30 exactly 2 years after release, the longest run for any game yet, nonetheless they still sold alot this year, just mostly outside the top 30, by the end of the year the games are now the all time best selling game in the country with 7.1m units sold, Mario eat your heart out.
The series is still going strong, a movie came out in July and yet another version of Green/Blue/Red came out on September called Pokémon Pikachu (Yellow outside Japan), you'd think franchise fatigue would've hampered its sales but nope, 1m sold in just 3 weeks.
I must note here that sales of Red/Green/Blue and Yellow all have an error margin of ±20k, you see Famitsu on their top 300 for 1998 actually combined sales of all 4 games, but I'm not, the data is added manually so there's a margin of error, there shouldn't be any difference in rankings however.
Anywho, 1998's big winner was Capcom's Resident Evil 2, the game sold more than what the first game sold on its first year in just one week, sales of Street Fighter have plummeted so Capcom has found a great replacement for now, no time to milk it, there were 2 other RE releases in 1998 get as much money as fast as possible, noteworthy on PlayStation too is Sony's own Gran Turismo as it was available for only 3 weeks.
Nintendo seems to be finding their little niche with the N64, they actually released plenty of games this year and sales have risen, to the surprise of no one it was a Pokémon what drove systems sales throughout the year, not the games most people wanted but a good result anyway, their non Pokemon titles are also doing very pretty good, Zelda, Mario Party, Yoshi's Story, Mario 64 and Mario Kart all showed great legs, mainly the last 2 as they were absent from top 30 every week of the year, very impressive results.
As said before, the GameBoy its having a little renasance thanks to Pokemon, this years big new franchise, Yu Gi Oh!, debuted on the system and its doing great, Enix tried their luck with a Pokemon like game and its also doing great, the biggest GB release this year however, wasn't software, but hardware, a new revision came out this year called the GameBoy Color, as its name implies it plays games with full color, the system has some improved hardware so its getting some games all for itself, the revision came to replace what would've been Nintendo's hardware mover, as the Pokémon sequels were delayed to late 1999, the GameBoy color sold 155.777 units on its week of release and went on to sell 702.037 units for the whole year.
On the Sony side things are bright as ever, the PlayStation is doing very, very well on all fronts, it got more games than all other systems combined and fittingly it also sold more software than everything else combined, not really much else to say that haven't been said before, it got the biggest games of 1998 and will be getting the biggest of 1999 as well.
On the Sega side, things aren't doing so well, the Saturn was indeed replaced this year, Sega's Project Katana, later named Dreamcast launched in November, selling 101.490 units on its launch week and 270.095 units for the whole year, not the best start for the system, what's weird its that Sega seemingly rushed its launch, there's barely any software for it, the Q1 & Q2 releases for the system are somewhat barren and it won't be releasing overseas until late '99, why release it now? What's worst is that third parties aren't particulary thrilled about the system, not that many games announced for it by them; 1999's biggest game, Final Fantasy VIII isn't planned for the system. On the other hand, the Saturn had a fine last year in terms of software, got some of its biggest games actually, not much else to say about it, for what its worth, there's more Saturn games announced for 1999 by third parties than what the Dreamcast or the Nintendo 64 are getting.
SNK new hardware this year for some reason, guess the failure of the Neo Geo wasn't enough so they went with the Neo Geo Pocket a handheld device, nobody but them have announced games for it, and only one game made it to Famitsu's Top 30, the system sold 21.471 on launch week and sold 40.638 for the whole year, pitiful start, not as if their games have that much pull anymore, Metal Slug, King of Fighters, Samurai Shodown aren't big names anymore, though times a head for the company.
Only gone for the throne for one year but Nintendo's back on top the publisher list, they might have to give it back to Squaresoft next year though.
Thread dedicated to Cloudman.
