Retro system sales - how to count?

[thetonestarr]

S.Peelman said:

thetonestarr said:

The point you make about OoT goes against what most generally consider, though - when talking about OoT sales, they are usually stated as a combination of all releases, unless otherwise stated.

Thus, most of the games, then, would be counted as follows: Star Fox (SNES): 2.99m; Star Fox (SNES:C): 5.28m; Star Fox (total): >8.27m etc.

Nah, it's becoming more and more clear that it should be considered an 8th gen release to support the 4th gen family - aka, option #2.

I can see option 2 working in some cases; you can compare Super Mario Bros 2 with Super Mario Bros 3 while counting both their rereleases on GBA. However I’d say it’s unfair if there was no (comparable) rerelease for a certain game; I wouldn’t compare Yoshi’s Island with it’s GBA rerelease to Yoshi’s Story. Bringing releases on the classic consoles into it becomes even more murky though, is the SNES Classic bought for Star Fox?

I would argue that every game on it has people that bought it for them. Some games likely had more people with them in mind than others, I'm sure, but I'm confident that every game has its reasonable percentage.

For me, Star Fox was absolutely one of the titles in question (in conjunction with Star Fox 2).

I did also buy it with the intention of hacking and adding a few titles to it for the convenience instead of digging out the SNES and using wired controllers, but ultimately the built-in titles (and particularly StarFox 2) were easily a large consideration there.

I also believe that, had it been packed with different sets of games, it would have easily sold less/more than it did/does, so the games included are absolutely factors in it selling. Plus NA/PAL got a different selection of titles than Japan, so not every single person got the same titles when buying them - just like Wii Sports & the Wii, etc - and I know people that went out of their way to import a Japanese model so they could have those titles instead.

Furthermore, official Tetris standalone plug-and-play devices are typically included when they calculate total Tetris sales, and even though each Tetris release is wildly different in available game modes and control options, they are all part of the grand total "Tetris" sales count (however, there are still very distinct numbers reported for each individual release as well).

All this considered, as I stated early on, I do agree that option #1 is obviously the wrong choice, as they ARE separate releases, but denying a relation and denying software numbers (option #3), I think, is the wrong way to go too.