What is the best-selling classic console?

[Gamevet]

I thought the numbers were a little low for the NES and Snes. I've seen numbers somewhere around 65-70 million for the NES.

[tom]

I thought the numbers were a little low for the NES and Snes. I've seen numbers somewhere around 65-70 million for the NES.

More the other way around, as stated in the book Game Over, Nintendo (and Sega for that matter) always over exaggerated their sales figures.

[Rob2600]

More the other way around, as stated in the book Game Over, Nintendo (and Sega for that matter) always over exaggerated their sales figures.

Interesting. I was under the impression that Nintendo always released the actual number of units sold to customers, while companies like Sony always released the number of units shipped to retail.

[Gamevet]

Europe has always been the region where sales numbers are questionable. The NES wasn't a huge seller there though, due to poor distribution and a late entry.

There's no question that it was far more successful than the 16-bit consoles, in North America. And in Japan the Mega Drive barely sold a couple million, while Snes and NES thrived.

[FoxNtd]

Europe has always been the region where sales numbers are questionable. The NES wasn't a huge seller there though, due to poor distribution and a late entry.

There's no question that it was far more successful than the 16-bit consoles, in North America. And in Japan the Mega Drive barely sold a couple million, while Snes and NES thrived.

Yes it would be best to show the regions for all the numbers. For example, both Mark III and Mega Drive were not huge sellers in their native land but in Europe they did pretty well, I think.

Here's the most curious fact about best-sellers per console generation, and it applies to virtually all generations and regions. The console that was the most powerful in terms of hardware/processing power was NOT the best seller. This is my proof for stating that having the best machine is not going to make your console the "best" in terms of sales. How good the software library for the console is, that is a whole other matter entirely.

[jb143]

Here's the most curious fact about best-sellers per console generation, and it applies to virtually all generations and regions. The console that was the most powerful in terms of hardware/processing power was NOT the best seller. This is my proof for stating that having the best machine is not going to make your console the "best" in terms of sales. How good the software library for the console is, that is a whole other matter entirely.

Well...that makes sense. More power is generally going to mean more expensive. And as far as how good the software library is...you have things like the Jaguar, which you argue all day long about how powerful it really was, but in the end it's extra power also brought a ton of programming challenges which surely affected the quality of the library.

[FoxNtd]

Well...that makes sense. More power is generally going to mean more expensive.

If we look at each region and each generation, grouping the consoles by price then I wonder if the cheapest console is often the winner or not. It might be tricky since a console's lifetime of sales can persist over periods of price drops which can boost sales toward the back-end of the lifetime.

Speaking about price reminds me of game depreciation. I have some Square games for SFC that have values over 10,000-11,000 Yen printed right on the box. These games are very near worthless today. It's kinda disturbing...