nordlead on 06 January 2010
| DM235 said: Any idea what caused the bump in sales for the NES in 1991? I would have thought that would have been SMB3, but it came out in 1990... |
upon further reading of the article I linked (actually in the software section), I may have discovered the reason for the bump.
The NES is a good indication of how small the videogame industry used to be. In its time, with 85-93% market share of the USA & Japan videogame markets the NES never really came that close to topping 100m units of software shipped in a single year. It is fair to say that the NES was the main catalyst for lifting the world videogame software market to over 100m for the first time in FY 1988 when other small systems (made by Atari, NEC and others) are added into the software totals above. The dip in FY 1990 is artificial - it was 7/12 of a year for Nintendo. If that is the case, then the videogame industry has never seen software shipments dip below 100m since the late 1980s, although FY 1995 is a tough call. This is a testament to the stability provided by the NES.
It looks like Nintendo adjusted their fiscal year and cut off 5 months, which would explain the drop to 5m units. However, it still managed to go back up from 8m to 8.5m, which while it isn't a major increase, essentially states that it maintained sales for 1.5 years after the peak.
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