There are two types of accounting when it comes to historical recording of their sales: consolidated, and non-consolidated. Non-consolidated sales recording refers to the recording of shipments from Nintendo Co. Ltd.'s domestic inventory in Kyoto, Japan to the inventories of their wholly-owned subsidiaries around the world. These subsidiaries have inventories of Nintendo hardware and software. Normally, Nintendo's subsidiaries inform the corporate office about expected retailer hardware demand, and Nintendo quickly provides them with the inventory to complete a sales transaction. However, until the Nintendo console is shipped to the retailer, Nintendo cannot register it as a "consolidated unit sale." Until then, Nintendo records it as a non-consolidated unit sale. The non-consolidated sales recording method was preferred initially because outside of Japan, NCL could instantly and precisely measure the exact amount of inventory leaving NCL's factories and allocated for sale across the world. Once the subsidiaries had full control over the product, it took a longer period of time for Nintendo Co., Ltd. to receive an exact amount of sales. Nintendo now receives real-time shipment information direct to their corporate offices, so non-consolidated, while still tracked and relevant, isn't as preferred. If you go on Nintendo's website, you can see that Nintendo only provides us with a historical database of consolidated unit sales. However, if you look closely, you can see that Nintendo doesn't disclose Consolidated unit sales prior to 1998. This sales history mixes two sets of data: non-consolidated from 1982 through 2000, and consolidated from 2001 through 2013. They won't disclose old consolidated data, presumably due to reliability issues.

So for the Gameboy the official shipment worldwide numbers are as follows:

by march 1990 3.93M
by march 1991 8.06M
by march 1992 10.67M
by march 1993 7.80M
by march 1994 7.47M
by march 1995 5.58M
by march 1996 4.16M
by march 1997 7.09M
by march 1998 9.66M
by march 1999 12.99M
by march 2000 17.45M
by march 2001 18.86M
by march 2002 4.70M
by march 2003 270k

A graph for it would look like this:

This is the data a neogaf user tabulated right? Nice to see it in graph form anyway.

I also have this bookmarked if you want to do anything with it: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1_ktRB2qmldCTsto2HFhGCK9V9W6D07RfaWlnfGYypCk/edit#gid=0
Someone recorded the quarterly shipments of everything including breakdown by SKU (there are 3 sheets, one each for handheld, console & a graph), unfortunately whoever made it stopped updating in 2016, and I think Nintendo only recorded every 6 months before 2003, but makes it easier than trawling through Nintendo's old IR reports.

I often return to that post as I always forget to save it. Really goes to show how popular the gameboy got thanks to Pokemon and the GB color

Nice thread OP

N64 did well in USA (SNES level) but flopped abroad

GC in the other hand flopped everywhere

GBA could have reached 100 million and it was a smash out-of-the-gate, but DS quickly replaced it. Only 3 years in the market before DS release is quite shocking. Still insane it moved freaking 80 million copies with such a short life span


Game Boy sales run was really one of a kind, its sales peak came when it was already 10 years in the market, mind-blowing

The USA is safe haven of Nintendo. Neither Japan have this performance. Gamecube, with macroeconomics trends in mind, was a worst-selling than Wiiu. Wiiu has the worst scenario. Gamecube problems were more internal than external, just imagine a Gamecube in bad economic trends, yesh! 

The sales curve of the Game Boy is insane.

Very very interesting numbers. Thank you very much!
The NES Numbers in Japan are somewhat "strange" to be honest^^

If you mean the long life, I suspect Nintendo may have just kept shipping them to sell off extra stock, it took 9 years to ship only 480k.

The original post was restored.
The chart has been updated.

I'm still salty that Nintendo doesn't separate Game Boy/Game Boy Color sales. And for that matter, I think significantly different iterations should be broken down in sales.
For instance
-Sales numbers of the PS4 Pro vs Standard and Slim
-Sales numbers of Xbox One X vs. Standard and S (Normal/All-Digital)
All I know is that the last several years of Game Boy were almost surely all Game Boy Color since even if Game Boy Pocket was somehow still available it had to be in tiny amounts.