"Europe is Sonyland."
-Conventional wisdom
It didn't slip past my attention that Europe is commonly considered a Sony territory, even by Nintendo fans. The big question that everyone is asking is what Nintendo can do to make it less one-sided with Switch. I will answer this question in this thread.
But before I delve into a deep analysis and provide said answer, let's take a look at historical data to determine how bad the state of things is for Nintendo.
Notes on the table
1. Numbers were taken from VGC's platform totals that were derived from official shipment data of Nintendo and Sony. Nintendo has consistently had a regional breakdown for their shipments and lumped Europe into what they call "Others". VGC uses roughly a 95% figure of Nintendo's "Others" to arrive at their numbers for Europe. Sony provided regional breakdowns for their shipments at some point, but ceased to do so eventually. VGC's figures have a margin of error for both companies, but it shouldn't be significant enough to make a real difference to the conclusions that can be drawn from the estimates.
2. Consoles with an asterisk are still selling, so their numbers represent the LTD figures for the week ending February 24th 2018.
3. The table is using commas instead of periods because I used a German interface; just pretend that you see periods. All figures are in millions.
4. Since the Game Boy and Game Boy Color spanned two generations, I made a manual split to VGC's GB figure. I added up Nintendo's official shipment figures for "Others" up until and including the fiscal year ending March 1996 and applied a 95% modifier to be in line with the rest of VGC's figures for Nintendo in Europe. The original PlayStation launched in late 1995 in Europe, so my cutoff isn't perfectly accurate and merely a compromise to calculate a total for Nintendo console sales before Sony entered the picture. The figure given for Pre-Sony Total in the table is inflated, i.e. too high. That is amplified by the SNES selling in Europe beyond late 1995. Logically, all of that means that the Sony-Era Total that is given for Nintendo in the table is lower than it should actually be. Ultimately though, the figures should still be good enough to work with them.
Generation | Sony | Sales | Nintendo | Sales |
3 | - | - | NES | 8,30 |
4 | - | - | GB | 16,13 |
4 | - | - | SNES | 8,15 |
Pre-Sony Total | N/A | 32,58 | ||
5 | - | - | GB/C | 23,92 |
5 | PS | 36,91 | N64 | 6,35 |
Gen 5 Total | 36,91 | 30,27 | ||
6 | - | - | GBA | 21,31 |
6 | PS2 | 55,28 | GC | 4,44 |
Gen 6 Total | 55,28 | 25,75 | ||
7 | PSP | 24,14 | DS | 52,07 |
7 | PS3 | 34,55 | Wii | 33,88 |
Gen 7 Total | 58,69 | 85,95 | ||
8 | PSV | 5,23 | 3DS* | 20,22 |
8 | PS4* | 30,45 | Wii U | 3,54 |
Gen 8 Total | 35,68 | 23,76 | ||
9 | TBA | - | Switch* | 3,90 |
Sony-Era Total | 186,56 | 169,63 | ||
Grand Total | 186,56 | 202,21 |
Legend11 correctly predicted that GTA IV (360+PS3) would outsell SSBB. I was wrong.
A Biased Review Reloaded / Open Your Eyes / Switch Shipments