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prayformojo on 10 February 2013
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Aielyn said:
prayformojo said:
The SNES only won in Japan, as far as I know. The Genesis outsold it in Europe and the US, where it sold 20 million units. Having said that, the SNES didn't pull ahead and destroy the Genesis until Sega had pretty much moved on with the Sega Cd and 32X/Saturn non sense. Either way you spin it, it's far from dominance.

http://segatastic.blogspot.com/2009/12/mega-drive-sales-figures-update.html (there are links to sales data there)

Actually, your link doesn't have links to sales data. It has links to one claim regarding sales of Genesis in the US - a figure which comes from the New York Times making a vague comment (there's really no way to know if they accurately reported, or if they interpreted "America" sales as "US" sales, for instance). And then the vast majority of the rest of the "data" regarding the Genesis comes from another Sega fansite, which itself doesn't provide any source whatsoever.

Surely Sega must have posted official shipped figures at some point.

And even by the numbers given there, the SNES outsold the Mega Drive in Europe. Figure given by that site for Europe: 6.9 million. Nintendo shipped figure for "Other" (which, at the time, was almost entirely Europe, with a bit of Australia thrown in) is 8.6 million. Non-European "other" back then wouldn't have been more than maybe 10%, so you're still looking at 7.8 million at least.

And once again, the SNES sold more than twice as many units of software as the Genesis. That's what I'd call dominance, even if hardware sales were more similar.

I suppose then, that it comes down to our definition of the word "dominance". To me, it means when one console pulls away from all the others to the point where from day ONE, it was never even close. The NES, PS1,PS2 and Wii dominanted. The SNES and Gensis were pretty much neck and neck for years.