Did Sega Really Sell 40 Million Genesis/Mega Drives?

[DonFerrari]

couchmonkey said:

DonFerrari said:

From what I remember here in VGC was that until the release of PS1 the Mega Drive/Genesis was ahead of Super Nintendo.

On Sega saying they sold over 40M, they legally can't lie about that so we have to accept the numbers.

On the shipments of famitsu. In Brazil Tec Toy manufactured Mega Drive and Gradient manufactured Snes. Don't know for sure if any of them would enter the shipment figures of the companies, but I would be positive that the famitsu figures wouldn't.

Mega Drive was selling in stores up to these days, there may be one or two years since the last time I saw a Mega Drive on a store, and there is a new Master System being sold.

About the arm and a leg, that is a little false. When I bought my PS1 it costed R$350 (equivalent to about 200 USD) in 2000, My PS2 was R$ 1000 in 2005 (equivalent to 350 USD) and unfortunately Mega Drive wasn't much cheaper, and surely both PS1 and PS2 were over 2x more expensive than in USA even on the grey shops, at the time neither were officially released by Sony in Brazil. One thing I can say for almost sure is that Mega Drive sold more in Brazil, perhaps because its games were a lot cheaper and therewere some counterfeit cartridges.

than 95 

Here is a link of Tectoy still selling the Mega Drive https://www.tectoy.com.br/pre-venda-mega-drive-edicao-limitada/p/995040461825 in Brazil, R$ 450 or about 120 USD.

It seems like they only got a lifetime license to manufacture the Master System and the Mega Drive, not ever getting a license for Saturn and Dreamcast unfortunatelly. I would like to have a pristine version of both

According to the graph Soundwave puts up, Snes outsells Genesis in 1992, years before PS1 hits the market.  even if we were to assume the chart is biased, there's no way Nintendo passed Sega by almost 20 mln in the last year and a half of their prime.  Street Figter Ii, Mortal Kombat, Donkey Kong Country, Sonic the Hedgehog...these systems were in their prime in 1992-1995.  actually, the surpriaing thung to me is that snes sells more in 1996 than 95 according to the chart!  Maybe price drops or something, 96 was a pretty zweak year for snes.

 

as for the rest of your post, intersting, but who would be tracking those sales of old consoles in Brazil with any accuracy?

That is the graphic he put, what I was saying is something I have seem here a lot of times, perhaps from out Megaman friend that loves to do graphics (always forget his name, but he post a lot of then in the NPD threads).

In Brazil we had from time to time a magazine called Veja that would track or make ranking from games... but Tectoy themselves would be a good tracking on their shipments if anyone were to get those numbers.

Mandalore76 said:

Soundwave said:

I've always found the claim that Sega sold 40 million Genesis/MD systems to be a bit ... odd. 

Granted I'm going off memory, but I strongly recall the number Sega gave at the end of the Genesis/SNES generation was that Genesis sold 30-33 million or so total. Somehow that turned into 40 million over the years. 

Well this cites shipment figures directly from Sega (and Nintendo) per Famitsu magazine and one other source:

So Sega was at 28.5 million at the end of March 1996. Nintendo was at 42.30 million. I find it it implausible that the Genesis sold another 12+ million between March 1996-1998 or whatever. No way. The SNES only shipped another 6 million or so after and the Genesis was even older and losing momentum quicker. 

33 milllion always sounded correct to me, not sure what Sega is using today to claim 40 mill (classic system re-releases?). 

I remember thinking about this recently and coming across this old post on:  http://www.sega-16.com/forum/archive/index.php/t-9132.html 

Wikipedia's 29 million is wrong.

Genesis: 19 million
European Mega Drive: 9 million
Japanese Mega Drive: 3.58 million
Majesco's sales: 2 million
Nomad: 1 million
Brazil: 2 million

That's 36.58 million. But what's missing?

Australia (Ozisoft handled it)
South Korea (Samsung handled it)
India
Other Asia

So if we assume they sold 1 million in each of those regions, we have 40.58 million units sold.

This is Wikipedia's sole source for the 29 million number.
http://www.wired.com/gaming/gamingreviews/multimedia/2007/05/gallery_game_history?slide=21

It's not exactly sturdy.
We can give them a better source, with better, more accurate numbers. 

And this would be much closer to Sega numbers.