Sales figures in general weren't quite as spot on as they are today. Toy Retail Sales tracking managed most of it for the United States and were not the most accurate as their numbers came from a small number of high volume retailers and they averaged those figures based on market share estimates to fill in the blanks.
NEC/TTI definitely knew how many units were manufactured and shipped to retail. But sell-through to consumers was a lot harder to track. I recall hearing stories from TZD about the sheer mass of inventory they got back from Toys R us while TTI was shutting down.
I suspect there were probably 3 times as many TurboGrafx CD systems and Duos sold in the US as there were copies of Cosmic Fantasy 2 sold (meaning my guess is around 60,000). We could throw LaserActive TurboGrafx PAC numbers on there, but it wouldn't increase the number by much if at all. I think the Duo sold quite a bit better than the CD attachment, though still not well enough to be considered more than a niche in North America.
Funny you say this, in the podcast, he states that the DUO didn't add to the user base much at all. (barely, in his words)
He also makes an estimate that Sega CD was roughly 3X the install base at 60K.
Again, just Vic being Vic
On GAF a few years ago Vic said that he thought that the Duo sold 20,000, and the Turbo CD system that or less. So his guess is probably 40,000 between the two systems. He also said that his Turbo CD games sold much better compared to the size of the audience than anything he's released since.
By "CD unit"; I assumed that he meant the Turbo CD and maybe even the TurboDuo, which were sold in Canada, but not Japan. Many Americans over the years have talked about how they had a Turbo CD or TurboDuo, but never owned CF2. Nec/TTi were so disorganized, I doubt that they kept proper sales numbers through to the end. It also seems weird that Nec/TTi would withhold hardware sales figures from one of their only third/1.5 parties, yet tell them that their game was selling 1:1. Whatever was said to Vic, it was probably early on during the Nec days, back when the CD library was small and CF2 was a much more significant release and he's just throwing two variables together in the middle of a conversation. It all plays into his cospiracy of "the only thing that ever held me back was outside forces!", which continued to haunt him as he jumped from console to console.
Sales figures in general weren't quite as spot on as they are today. Toy Retail Sales tracking managed most of it for the United States and were not the most accurate as their numbers came from a small number of high volume retailers and they averaged those figures based on market share estimates to fill in the blanks.
NEC/TTI definitely knew how many units were manufactured and shipped to retail. But sell-through to consumers was a lot harder to track. I recall hearing stories from TZD about the sheer mass of inventory they got back from Toys R us while TTI was shutting down.
I suspect there were probably 3 times as many TurboGrafx CD systems and Duos sold in the US as there were copies of Cosmic Fantasy 2 sold (meaning my guess is around 60,000). We could throw LaserActive TurboGrafx PAC numbers on there, but it wouldn't increase the number by much if at all. I think the Duo sold quite a bit better than the CD attachment, though still not well enough to be considered more than a niche in North America.
So your guess would be 20,000 CD systems and 40,000 Duos or something? Do you think the Duo sold a lot better than the CD system? On ebay at least both are quite uncommon, I'm not sure which you see more of... but sure, those numbers sound quite plausible too.
Probably, I also made an assumption he was speaking in regards to when he was still publishing for both. So a very small timeframe.
Well, the Duo was closing in on its last gasps for breath by the time Lunar came out. If I recall correctly Exile: Wicked Phenomenon came out around July or August of 1993 and Lunar came out in December as their next release. Cosmic Fantasy 3 and those Neo-Geo Ports were still apparently on the schedule while Lunar was being worked on. But as the holiday season of 1993 was not so kind to the Turbo those were cancelled.
And Vasteel released earlier in the year, I guess? Finding actual release dates for any of those 1993-1994 Turbografx/CD games (even just release MONTHS!) is so ridiculously hard... it's quite frustrating.
Really? Got that high? I would have bet the under at 1,000,000.
Supposedly the Sega CD sold 6 million systems worldwide, 2.5 million of those in the US, which puts it almost a million more than the number of Saturns sold in the US... much less Turbo CDs and their 40-60 thousand likely sales. (Or even the TG16 itself; the best guess is like 900,000 for the TG16 in the US, right? Versus 20-something million Genesises in the Americas...) Some people doubt the Sega CD worldwide and US sales numbers, but those are the only numbers we have.
