Production qty's

[Vimtoman]

Is there any info on production quantities per title.

[Ergot_Cholera]

Wha......?

[HailingTheThings]

No. Absolutely not. Never.

[Black Tiger]

Several collectards have tried to "prove" impossibly low numbers to further inflate the market.

Like pointing out the fact that Magical Chase was a mail-order only title not available in Canada and less than 1000 units were manufactured, but almost all of them were destroyed and buried with concrete.

[lukester]

I would love to know production/sales figures too, but I have no idea. Just that Tengai Makyou II was the best selling game.

The most popular games in the U.S. were Bonk 1, Splatterhouse and Keith Courage (bundled).

In Japan, some of them were Fire Pro Wrestling, F1 Circus, Tengai Makyou, and I guess R-Type. Some Namco games were crazy popular too. 

[SamIAm]

I've googled this a lot in Japanese, but with very few results to show for it.

In PCE magazines, they released sales rankings with "scores" that were based on the actual sales number divided by some mystery variable. To make matters worse, every now and then, they even changed the variable. If we could find out some hard numbers for particular games and make up a database of all the "scores", we might start to get somewhere, but there just isn't a reliable enough source out there.

A lot of people do say that Tengai Makyo II was the best selling game, but even then, the numbers are all over the place. There was a magazine that said 500k. Hudson said 300k. The writer/director said 200k. And there's a sales records website that says 130k.

I personally think there is room to doubt whether TMII really was the top selling game. We know from multiple reliable sources there were about 1 million Japanese Duo owners, about 3.8 million base PCE owners, and that about 1 million of those base PCE owners had the CD expansion. That's twice as many people who can play Hucards as can play CDs. Personally, I wouldn't be surprised if the best selling game is one of the Hucards from late 1989/early 1990, just because that was the peak time for the system.

This chart came from a PCE magazine from 1993 (I think). The bars are base PCE systems (white) and CD-ROM systems (black) and the lines are total Hucard sales (red) and CD game sales (green). The left y-axis corresponds to the systems, and goes up to 4 million, while the right y-axis corresponds to game sales and goes to 6 million.

[Vimtoman]

Thanks SamIAm thats the best info I've seen so far.
I guess dividing the titles released each year should give us an average per title.
minus
A percentage of the amount trashed.

I'm just interested if there's still a large amount sitting in Japanese cupboards .

[shabba]

I've googled this a lot in Japanese, but with very few results to show for it.

In PCE magazines, they released sales rankings with "scores" that were based on the actual sales number divided by some mystery variable. To make matters worse, every now and then, they even changed the variable. If we could find out some hard numbers for particular games and make up a database of all the "scores", we might start to get somewhere, but there just isn't a reliable enough source out there.

A lot of people do say that Tengai Makyo II was the best selling game, but even then, the numbers are all over the place. There was a magazine that said 500k. Hudson said 300k. The writer/director said 200k. And there's a sales records website that says 130k.

I personally think there is room to doubt whether TMII really was the top selling game. We know from multiple reliable sources there were about 1 million Japanese Duo owners, about 3.8 million base PCE owners, and that about 1 million of those base PCE owners had the CD expansion. That's twice as many people who can play Hucards as can play CDs. Personally, I wouldn't be surprised if the best selling game is one of the Hucards from late 1989/early 1990, just because that was the peak time for the system.

This chart came from a PCE magazine from 1993 (I think). The bars are base PCE systems (white) and CD-ROM systems (black) and the lines are total Hucard sales (red) and CD game sales (green). The left y-axis corresponds to the systems, and goes up to 4 million, while the right y-axis corresponds to game sales and goes to 6 million.

Fantastic info. Thanks for this.

[elmer]

That's pretty clear evidence that the Super Famicom absolutely killed HuCard sales as soon as it came out, and that it was only the release of the Super System Card that saved NEC's bacon.

[SamIAm]

The Japanese text says that the drop in Hucard sales in 1991 stands out, and that this wasn't due only to the release of the Super System Card, but also to "panic selling" in 1990. It says that although there were good games among the 126 released in 1990, the effect was probably to cause consumers to lose some trust.