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Pineapple on 15 January 2011
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Lucas-Rio said:
Pineapple said:

This is hardly surprising. Platformers have always been Nintendo's franchise. To date, only one Nintendo platform had less than 10% of its sales from platformers (the Gamecube), and not a single non-Nintendo machine has had even 7%, although the PsP got very close.

You can call platforming dead on the Ps3, but the Ps3 is selling equally many platformers as all non-Nintendo machines ever have.

Note that the older machines might have slightly lacking data, so they're probably a tiny bit higher than represented here. The percentages are the percentage of total software sales that are platformers. The total software sales were found here: http://gamrfeed.vgchartz.com/story/81136/big-three-shipment-update-forecasts-through-june-2010/ , except for the current generation machines which are just sold to date.

Gameboy Gameboy Colour: 66.4 million (13%)
Gameboy Advance: 51.5 million (13.5%)
Nintendo DS: 67.9 million (10.5%)
Playstation Portable: 14 million (7%)

Nintendo Entertainment System: 90.1 million (18%)

Super Nintendo Entertainment System: 65.7 million (16.5%)
Sega Genesis: 14.04 million (Roughly 3.5% )

Playstation 1: 47 million (5%)
Nintendo 64: 34.2 million (15%)
Saturn: 0.83 million (No idea)

Playstation 2: 44.15 million (3%)
Gamecube: 15.7 million (8%)
Xbox: 6 million (3%)

Wii: 64.6 million (10.5%)
Ps3: 11.72 million (3.33%)
X360: 9 million (2%)

 

Very interesting numbers but like you said, VGChartz may be missing a tons of games from the NES/SNES era.

Anyway, we can clearly see the declines of platforming both in terms of % and in term of units on home console from the NES generation until the last generation.

The Wii is now responsible for a new growth and a rebirth of this genre. and I am very happy of that. The Wii has already passed any non Nintendo console and should reach the 70 millions, because NSMBWii, SMG2, Donkey Kong and Epic Mickey will continue to sell well and because Kirby has not been released in Europe.

The Wii will be rememebered as one of the best machine for platformers and it will be his legacy eventhough the % of platformers is lower than in the previous Nintendo console excepted the gamecube.

This genre that a lot of people thought extinct has still a lot of fans.

VGChartz data is definitely quite incomplete for the 3rd and 4th generation. It's worth noting that Nintendo's platformers are the ones that sell, though, and VGChartz data for old Nintendo games is very close to complete. Still, there's only data of half of the software sales on the SNES and NES. The true number for the NES and SNES could very well be 1/3rd higher than the data above suggests.

I'm inclined to believe the Wii will surpass the NES in platformer sales, though. It seems likely the Wii is going to keep having around 10% of its sales be from platformers, and its software sales are likely to end in the 1250 million - 1750 million. (The Ps2 saw a bit over 1500 million). That puts the Wii's platformer sales at 125-175 million. I think that's quite possible, although I find the lower end more realistic.