VGAnalyz Series: Introduction and First Concept

Hello ladies and gentlemen and welcome to my first entry in my biggest project on VGChartz: the VGAnalyz Series. (logo to come )

The idea, the purpose

The idea of this series is to present the data we have in different perspectives. These perspectives are meant to pull meaning from the data where the traditional representations fail to.

In fact, when looking at a stone from one angle, it is only possible to see one single face. However, by turning the stone, you may see details you never saw before. The same can be said about a hollow cube with one face open, which you cannot see until the cube is rotated. The inside of the cube may hold details you had never seen.

First Pilot: A Study of game platform performance by manufacturer, by region. First case: Europe

To begin the project, I will start by studying the progression of gaming platform sales by manufacturer in the region of Europe. Without further ado, the study.

First Pilot: Sales performance by manufacturer, Region: Europe

For my first study, I have assembled the sales per manufacturer, and separated home offerings from handheld offerings, and separated them by generation. Below is the graph.

*Master System data taken from Wikipedia

** Game Boy data includes Game Boy Color and was amortized linearly over gens 3 to 5 (lifespan of GB was 1989 to 2003)

Study:

Handhelds:

As you can see, handheld sales have been healthy from the get-go. Nintendo being the main provider of handheld offerings mostly up until gen 6 (most other offerings bar Game Gear did not contribute much to total sales in Europe), the handheld market really boomed in Europe as of the DS, and subsequently, but less significantly, the PSP.

Home offerings:

Prior to Gen 5, the European region was mostly split between Nintendo and SEGA, mostly 50-50, for both the NES and the SNES eras. In gen 5 (the PSX era), the European presence of main home consoles took a radical jump upwards, thanks to Sony. The jump provided by sony in gen 6 was of 36.91M units, while Nintendo provided a small 6.35M, and SEGA barely a million.

The Sony trend continues on in gen 6 with the PS2, with barely any competition from the GC, Xbox and DC. Finally, in gen 7, the situation turns around radically as Nintendo manages to obtain more than 40%, with record European sales of 31.16M. Microsoft makes a place for itself by selling 20.21M, versus 24M for Sony, still leading above MS.

It would seem that the headway made by Sony would have made room for competition to obtain newly created marketshare from gens 5 & 6.

Total:

Looking at the total sales the growth of the dedicated console market is tremendous. Below is the growth curve:

Hope you found this information and these graphs helpful. Have fun discussing below!

The reference data:

In table form (for copy-pasting - Quote post to copy paste the table):

*bump* just finished redacting the study.

Interesting how the portable consoles took off. I wonder if they will continue to grow this gen or if they will shrink due to competition from smartphones and tablets. I wouldn't doubt the latter.

The most impressive thing I find is Sony's penetration during the PSX era, outselling the previous home console market presence by a factor of two!

The next most impressive thing in the data is how Nintendo, after only having sold a maximum of 8M home console units in Europe in gens 3 to 6, managed to really make a killing in gen7 with 31M units sold!

And of course, Sony's 52M in gen6 is a serious record! Will be very hard to beat, and destroyed the SNES era.

Sony were the first to actually make an effort here in Europe.

Nintendo and Sega were small companies based in Japan, the effort involved in spreading their operations across Europe was not thought to be worth it at the time. Sony was already a big multinational company so it wasn't too much of an effort to sell the PSX there.

The N64 still suffered here in part because Nintendo still wasn't trying very hard here, but also because Sony had become the defacto console. GC didn't really do well anywhere, with America being the only place it sold reasonably. That and being against the PS2 it didn't have much chance.

will keep an eye on this.

Great text... What about an analysis of software sales in the next thread?

The idea is most welcome and will likely make it into an entry in this series.

Thanks!