Curmudgeon Gamer
09 February 2007
The best selling game systems of all time
In a business whose headlines are dominated by the hardware and software sales of Nintendo, Sony, and Microsoft, it helps to have a little perspective. In this case, the needed context is probably in your pocket right now.
Let's review some numbers. In the last two generations, Sony has sold over 230 million PlayStation-branded game machines. Nintendo has sold nearly 400 million from its home consoles -- NES, SNES, Nintendo 64, and GameCube -- to its long-dominant handheld systems -- Game Boy, Game Boy Color, Game Boy Advance, and Nintendo DS. While it has only had a console on shelves since 2001, Microsoft has already racked up combined sales of over 30 million of its two Xbox systems.
Yet these are not the game systems most people own. Their game systems don't say Nintendo or Microsoft or Sony. They say Nokia or Motorola or Samsung. (Ok, some of them actually do say Sony: Sony Erricsson. But they're still relatively small.) Even the cheapest phones can play some form of Tetris nowadays and many are far, far more capable.
According to Strategy Analytics, over one billion mobile phones shipped during all of 2006. In all of 2006, the leading vendor, Nokia, shipped almost 350 million phones. Those numbers are just staggering when compared to the sales of dedicated game systems. For example, if we consider all the systems shipped by Microsoft, Sony, and Nintendo since 1983 and compare to just the mobile phone shipments in 2006 we get the following:
In fact, if we combine the numbers for Microsoft, Sony, and Nintendo and stack that up against the mobile phone shipments, it's still not much of a contest.
According to NPD, the dedicated videogame market made an estimated $6.5 billion on software last year alone. With over a billion phones shipped in 2006, is it any surprise that analysts regularly predict that the mobile game market will eventually hit $10 billion a year in the near future?
Let's review some numbers. In the last two generations, Sony has sold over 230 million PlayStation-branded game machines. Nintendo has sold nearly 400 million from its home consoles -- NES, SNES, Nintendo 64, and GameCube -- to its long-dominant handheld systems -- Game Boy, Game Boy Color, Game Boy Advance, and Nintendo DS. While it has only had a console on shelves since 2001, Microsoft has already racked up combined sales of over 30 million of its two Xbox systems.
Yet these are not the game systems most people own. Their game systems don't say Nintendo or Microsoft or Sony. They say Nokia or Motorola or Samsung. (Ok, some of them actually do say Sony: Sony Erricsson. But they're still relatively small.) Even the cheapest phones can play some form of Tetris nowadays and many are far, far more capable.
According to Strategy Analytics, over one billion mobile phones shipped during all of 2006. In all of 2006, the leading vendor, Nokia, shipped almost 350 million phones. Those numbers are just staggering when compared to the sales of dedicated game systems. For example, if we consider all the systems shipped by Microsoft, Sony, and Nintendo since 1983 and compare to just the mobile phone shipments in 2006 we get the following:
In fact, if we combine the numbers for Microsoft, Sony, and Nintendo and stack that up against the mobile phone shipments, it's still not much of a contest.According to NPD, the dedicated videogame market made an estimated $6.5 billion on software last year alone. With over a billion phones shipped in 2006, is it any surprise that analysts regularly predict that the mobile game market will eventually hit $10 billion a year in the near future?
--jvm at 14:46
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