I learned something fascinating about N64 sales

[tolu619]

Shadow1980 said:

drake_tolu said:

According to NPD N64 have sold like one monster in USA...

N64 have sold 11 million first 30 month in USA, versus the 8.5 million of PS1!

Yeah. According to the NPD, the SNES sold on the order of 17 million units lifetime, while the N64 sold about 18 million. As for the PS1, it was selling dreadfully in the U.S. early on. While I have only have a graph and not exact numbers for monthly sales, prior to its first price cut it appeared to have averages less than 50k units per month during 1996. Meanwhile, despite being on the market for a single quarter (well, three months and a week), the N64 sold nearly as much in 1996 as the PS1 did all of that year, coming only 20k short of the PS1's 1.99M. By the end of 1997, at which point it had been on the U.S. market for 15 months, the N64 had sold 6.46M units LTD. This made the N64 the fastest-selling console in the U.S. released since the NPD started tracking sales until it was beaten by the PS2, and even today it's the third-fastest-selling console in U.S. history (it may drop to 4th if the PS4 sells more than 4.45M in the U.S this year, which it's looking extremely likely that it will).

But the loss of Final Fantasy was just too costly, and the PS1 took off when FFVII came out. In the last four months of 1997 the PS1 nearly doubled its LTD sales, making it perhaps the biggest comeback in the history of console gaming (though the Genesis might give it a run for its money). Had the N64 been CD-based, it would have retained all that third-party support, and it's likely that PlayStation would have ended up a niche brand. Nintendo's insistence on sticking with cartridges was probably the most significant thing in gaming since the Crash of '83, as it resulted a major realignment in the industry. I wonder what the face of gaming had been like if Nintendo had went with CDs.

This has been very revealing