The european market (with real pieces of History inside)

I just looked up when Sega and Nintendo first formed their European subsidiaries:

- Sega of Europe was established in 1986, in London <-- doubtful veracity of the source, so I retract this statement
- Nintendo of Europe was established in 1990, in Großostheim (neir Frankfurt/Main), Germany (!)

which could explain why SEGA had a head start in Europe and outperformed Nintendo in the beginning (since Nintendo had to rely on other parties, mainly Bandai, to distribute their product), and Nintendos SNES later on performed better than the Mega Drive in Germany (what with the euopean distribution center sitting in Germany).

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Originally Posted by youloute

Sorry, I was referring to "3.5 millions NES units sold in Europe."

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Yeah, we already disproved that statement, it was simply misread, I own the cited source so I know its incorrect.

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Originally Posted by Phantar

I just looked up when Sega and Nintendo first formed their European subsidiaries:

- Sega of Europe was established in 1986, in London
- Nintendo of Europe was established in 1990, in Großostheim (neir Frankfurt/Main), Germany (!)

which could explain why SEGA had a head start in Europe and outperformed Nintendo in the beginning (since Nintendo had to rely on other parties, mainly Bandai, to distribute their product), and Nintendos SNES later on performed better than the Mega Drive in Germany (what with the euopean distribution center sitting in Germany).

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Virgin Mastertronic distributed SEGA master system hardware and games and handled the launch of the Mega Drive . Also when in comes to Germany and more so France , Nintendo always had a big following.

TNG>Oops, my bad.

Phantar> I read in L'histoire de nintendo vol 3 (which seems quite reliable) that Minoru Arakawa, president of NOA, was in charge of the worldwide market (while Yamauchi was in charge of the japanese market). So, though it was called Nintendo of America, this structure also ruled the european market before the creation of NOE.
Nevertheless, the commercials were made in Europe. Germany was in charge of making them but the guy who directed Bandai France didn't want to have german commercials on the French TV.

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Originally Posted by Phantar

I just looked up when Sega and Nintendo first formed their European subsidiaries:

- Sega of Europe was established in 1986, in London
- Nintendo of Europe was established in 1990, in Großostheim (neir Frankfurt/Main), Germany (!)

which could explain why SEGA had a head start in Europe and outperformed Nintendo in the beginning, and Nintendos SNES later on performed better than the Mega Drive in Germany.

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No, Master System in Europe was handled by Mastertronic (later Virgin Mastertronic), and other native companies, Sega had next to no involvement with the sales side of SMS in Europe, at all (I've personally spoken to people working for Mastertronic), Mastertronic asked Sega for the Sega licence in 1987 and they got it, they sold SMS in Britain in 1987 and did extremely well (they sold out), Sega then told them to take over the French and German markets the next year.

In 1991 Sega bought and took over Virgin Mastertronic, I think this became Sega Europe as it now is.

I believe NES was handled by Mattel (and other companies) until Nintendo created NoE, so really in Europe it was Mastertronic Vs Mattel (and whoever else had the licence for each specific country)

I don't think there was any integrated base of operations for Europe for either company until the 90s.

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Originally Posted by Team Andromeda

Also when in comes to Germany and more so France , Nintendo always had a big following.

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After comparing different sources we've already come to the conclusion that the race between the NES and the SMS was a pretty close one in Germany several posts before that... so please don't bring up the "Nintendo was always more popular in Germany" card again unless you have more concrete info, since this is maybe true from the 16-bit era onwards, but not before that!

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Originally Posted by Thenewguy

No, Master System in Europe was handled by Mastertronic (later Virgin Mastertronic), and other native companies, Sega had next to no involvement with the sales side of SMS in Europe, at all (I've personally spoken to people working for Mastertronic), Mastertronic asked Sega for the Sega licence in 1987 and they got it, they sold SMS in Britain in 1987 and did extremely well (they sold out), Sega then told them to take over the French and German markets the next year.

In 1991 Sega bought and took over Virgin Mastertronic, I think this became Sega Europe as it now is.

I believe NES was handled by Mattel (and other companies) until Nintendo created NoE, so really in Europe it was Mastertronic Vs Mattel (and whoever else had the licence for each specific country)

I don't think there was any integrated base of operations for Europe for either company until the 90s.

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I've taken the info from this source that states Sega of Europe was formed in 1986. So is that source incorrect, or was the Sega of Europe subdivision located in Japan back then?

Sorry, didnt want to misilead anyone...

Some informations about SOE's birth in page 2.

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Originally Posted by Phantar

I've taken the info from this source that states Sega of Europe was formed in 1986. So is that source incorrect, or was the Sega of Europe subdivision located in Japan back then?

Sorry, didnt want to mislead anyone...

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I think that either the source is incorrect, or its talking about a small-ish office being set up to handle some of Sega's affairs in Europe, maybe work out orders and pass on information etc, though now I'm wondering about the arcade side of Sega :huh: Mastertronic didn't handle the arcade games as far as I know, so who did? maybe this SoE in London?

There's a decent amount of info on Mastertronic here http://www.guter.org/mastertronic_history.htm (scroll down to Sega section)

^thanks. After having a closer look at my previous source I kinda doubt its accuracy, so I better retract my earlier statement (should have had more than just a glance at this). So I guess Sega of Europe didn't really exist as such before 1991.

Was most of Europe's NES sales handled by Bandai? Mattel seem to have only sold the system in Britain and Italy.

AFAIK, Bandai was in charge of the NES only in France (3 months afther the official French launch), Belgium and Nederland.

Back to some more general Euro info

A little bit more info on Denmark, again from ACE Magazine - Danish government put a 200% import tax on software, Commodore have "cleaned up with the Amiga", and piracy is so rife that a best seller will sell ~200 copies, whilst their videogame magazines have readerships of ~20,000.

Here's some info on the unreleased Konix Multi-System, which, along with the Amstrad GX4000, was supposed to be Britain's answer to the Japanese 16-bit consoles.

Its a bit of a weird design, and looks quite silly to be honest, but I think KoolKitty indicated in another thread that whilst not so great for 2D (compared to Mega Drive), it could've done Star Fox style graphics in 1989

Not sure how accurate this info is, or how much hyperbole there is

http://img835.imageshack.us/img835/2371/konix1.png

Uploaded with ImageShack.us

http://img17.imageshack.us/img17/3134/konix2.png

http://img851.imageshack.us/img851/6929/konix3.png

http://img585.imageshack.us/img585/5544/konix4.png

There were a few bits and pieces of unfinished software for the system shown in this video.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nYpeb...eature=related

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Originally Posted by Thenewguy

France could very well be the biggest NES country in Europe, I know in Britain there were only ~1.1 million NES' sold

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I would be interested to know where you got that figure because when I was researching this for something I wrote for a website a couple of years ago the NES figure I found for the UK was 600,000. The SMS figure I came across was 10 million for Europe as a whole and 3 million of them in the UK.

Interestingly I used to work for game back in 1993/1994 and we were still selling Master Systems and the software for them while we didn't stock anything NES at all.

ah yeah, the Konix... what an odd, yet oddly fascinating concept that was.

Speaking of country-spcific consoles, here's the Interton VC 4000, the only video game console designed and created in Germany, way back in 1978 (yep, before even the Intellivision or the Colecovision hit the scene).
Yeah - there was only one video game console designed in Germany, and that was way in the beginning... kinda strange, isn't it?

http://www.old-computers.com/museum/...n_vc4000_1.jpg

4 colors, mono-sound, but already with analog-sticks. Controllers were hardwired into the console. Like Intellivision and Colecovision, the controllers came with interchangeable overlays used for different games. Until 1982 about 40 games were released for the system before it was discontinued.

And here's some more technical info on the Interton VC 4000.

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Originally Posted by Crackdown

I would be interested to know where you got that figure because when I was researching this for something I wrote for a website a couple of years ago the NES figure I found for the UK was 600,000. The SMS figure I came across was 10 million for Europe as a whole and 3 million of them in the UK.

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I have many sources in regards to British sales figures, I've actually been searching for figures on an off for years now, and have some info written down for virtually every year in regards to these particular two machines, sources were from a variety of different magazines, CVG, Mega, ACE, The Games Machine, EDGE, different Newspaper articles such as The Independent, website articles etc, and the government funded Monopolies and Mergers investigation into the prices of videogames in the UK.

Most sources agree on ~1 million for NES, and ~1.5 million for SMS, and they agree on something like a 60/40 split marketshare wise.

The Independent article however, disagreed with most sources, and indicated that both systems had sold ~1.5 million each.

The EDGE article also contradicted all other sources and indicated that the NES actually sold slightly more than the SMS in the UK.

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Originally Posted by Crackdown

Interestingly I used to work for game back in 1993/1994 and we were still selling Master Systems and the software for them while we didn't stock anything NES at all.

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Yeah, the NES started to disappear from major retail outlets in the UK in 1993, but Master System sales at the time were low, and dropping fast (in fact, by 1994 Mega Drive sales started to drop fast too), by 1994 I doubt that SMS was selling more than 100,000 units a year in the UK.

Not sure about the accuracy of this so take it with a grain of salt, but it says that in 1987 there were 50,000 Atari STs in France, and in 1988 the system reached a 100,000 userbase

http://atari.fr.free.fr/atariavenue/histoire.htm

Jesper Kyd talking about his career, Reto Moto, Zyrinx, Dice...

Just noticed some updates going on on Wikipedia, these graphs were mentioned, they were in pieces so I glued them together.

They apparently deal with only the "active" userbase, so they go down when interest for the console drops, that seems like a weird way to do things to me, but either way here they are

The French SMS figures contradict the ones we've seen here, the UK SMS figures are in the same ballpark as I've seen in the past (its usually said to have been ~1.5 million)

Both German Mega Drive figures, and UK Mega Drive figures up to 1994 are close to what the Man!ac scan indicated from what I can recall.

http://img38.imageshack.us/img38/182...nstallbase.png

Here's an interesting article on the Netherlands, its from an old Retrogamer magazine(from the time when they were very low budget)

http://i39.tinypic.com/bzul1.png

http://i43.tinypic.com/2zybj29.png

http://i44.tinypic.com/2j4au7k.png

about dutch market I can say that atari was real stronghold. netherlands is only country I think where even the atari lynx was very popular and it's still fairly easily obtained. same goes for philips cdi which you can basically get for free now here. as for nintendo and sega. it is a bit complicated as I think master system inititally had very bad disitribution her eunlike nes. so in 80s everyone had a nes. but when megadrive came. master system started sell very well and megadrive was way more popular than snes. but I think not as much a difference as in uk or in spain and in italy(to lesser extent than spain). where I've been and was amazed in every way by how much sega consoles and games can be found. even for saturn. Sapinw as sega's biggest stronghold no doubt and had a huge market. even today check eba.es and they have 20 pages for saturn stuff alone. portugal smaller market but same thing and italy as well but also smaller market

still in netherlands the most popular in late 80s and early 90s was no doubt the amiga. same as in germany, scandinavia and uk and almost everywhere in europe I think

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Originally Posted by Phantar

Do not forget that in Europe, the Master System was supported up until 1996, and was discontinued together with the Mega Drive.

hm. Alright, let's try rolling this question up from another angle:

According to this article, Nintendo (and I quote) "only shipped 8.56m NES consoles in non-Americas & Japan regions".
Furthermore, the book "Game Over" states that Nintendo sold only 3.5 Million NES-units in Europe. <== scratch that, misconception.

The Master System officially sold 13 mio. units worldwide (not counting Majesco- and TecToy-versions). According to this source, only 1.5 million systems were sold in the US.
That leaves 11.5 Million Master Systems sold outside of Japan and the US. Now, if we could extrapolate how many Sega Master System-units were sold in Brazil, we could get a good estimate of how well the Master System fared against the NES in Europe.

(hm, although this still leaves Australia out of this calculation...)

/edit: found another nice graphic, LA Times from a british magazine (I don't know which, exactly).
http://img714.imageshack.us/img714/9894/segasales.jpg

1990: 1.6 million SEGA units (although those numbers include Genesis sales) vs 655.000 NES-units sold in Europe. Though I can't say how reliable this source is, what with the Typo ("staggereing") and the somewhat mystifying way to end the article...


Before Jack Tramiel took over, the Atari VCS and home computer systems were pretty successful, so I'd rather say Germany was more of an "Atari"-country... :p

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are you sure about 13 million sms worldwide? I thought 14 million. brazil had it's own master system versions from tec toy and sold 3 million of them I read in segabase.

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Originally Posted by Thenewguy

If these figures are even remotely accurate, then the NES probably destroyed the SMS in European sales.

NES sold more than SMS in Germany, Scandinavia, and (if this is true) France too, at the moment the only country where SMS won is the UK, though we do really need some figures and info for Spain and Italy (albeit even if SMS did win those markets, their sales should be fairly low compared to Britain/France/Germany regardless)

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in germany I'd say it was pretty even between the two. in spain and italy sega ruled the roost big time. I don't think I ever found a nes/snes in italy or spain, unlike sega consoles and even many saturns as I have said at least in spain.

http://i.imgur.com/bSjod.jpg

Sega Power December 1995

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Is the MegaDrive DEAD?

Cue the gloomy music. The arrival of the Saturn portends the end of the Mega Drive. It's all over. Might as well bury it now, at least we'll get some decent maggots out of it. OR WILL WE? We take a look into the future and find that things are much better than they seem...

"The Saturn is here. The Mega Drive is dead. Sega are bloated, corporate, scum-sucking parasites, swilling their consumers' blood around their fat, furred-up stomachs."

This, apart from a great excuse to insult Sega for free, is not necessarily true. Although the Saturn is well and truly here, this does not necessarily mean that it's curtains for the Mega Drive.

Going by what some of our readers have been saying recently, allied to the run of the gossip on the Internet, the casual observer would be forgiven for thinking that Sega is bent on running the Mega Drive, their most profitable machine ever, into the ground. Or at least ignoring it in favour of their new bouncing baby, the Saturn. But a look at Sega's history, plus a hint of their future plans should be enough to scotch this idea.

Let's begin with what Sega have to say. Mark Maslowicz, Sega's UK spokesman reckons that this coming Christmas, "We will sell far more Mega Drive games than Saturn, and this is likely to be the case for some time to come." He says that "The Mega Drive is an integral part of our plans for the next couple of years. We've got a full schedule for 1996 and are, therefore, in a good position to be able to pick and choose what we release."

Believe them? A look at Sega's history should provide a guide. When the Mega Drive was first released, Sega - and more importantly, third party developers - continued to support the Master System right up until the middle of last year. Many games received multi-format Sega releases and even systems that had obvious problems like the Mega CD were supported for far longer than probably made sense - Eternal Champions being an example.

However, the Mega Drive was essentially the same kind of machine as the Master System and Game Gear. It couldn't do much that was radically different from the other machines - it just did it faster and more colourfully. This made it relatively easy to convert titles across the three of them.

The Saturn is a different prospect. Its capabilities are way ahead of the Mega Drive's. Titles like Bug! simply could not get a Mega Drive release in any form, and this is a situation that is hardly going to improve as Saturn games become even more technically advanced. So from one angle, it's unlikely that the higher-end Saturn games will ever make it onto the Mega Drive in the same way as Mega Drive games appeared on the Master System.

Sega accept this but point out that this is what the 32X is for. Maslowicz again: "It's possible that you'll see some Saturn games on the 32X, if not on the Mega Drive."

However, it's possible that developers will continue to approach the Saturn from the other direction, developing on the Mega Drive, then converting to the Saturn. This does mean that Saturn games will be constrained by what the Mega Drive can do, so it's not likely that we'll see much of this.

But the main reason we should quit quivering with worry is that Sega sold some 3 million Mega Drives in the UK alone and they're not going to let all those potential customers vanish without a fight. Backing this approach up is Sega's claim that since the Saturn went on sale, sales of Mega Drive games have started to increase on the back of all the publicity.

Maslowicz reckons that "The next generation machines will revive the console market as a whole." And, he points out, that "Now the Mega Drive packs are so cheap, many Master System owners who didn't move into 16 bit will feel it's time to upgrade, so there's still life to be found there."

Sega's strategy regarding their consoles is to have a product line, starting from your basic entry-level bog-standard Mega Drive, all the way up to the 32X and Saturn. Maslowicz says that Sega's aim is "to have different products at different prices," pointing out that's what many other manufacturers do with TV - from the portables right up to thedigital stereo 22 inch models.

Whether or not this works remains to be seen. Whatever happens, Mega Drive owners can be sure that there's plenty of life left yet.

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Xmas marks the spot

This Christmas (1995), £100 will buy you one of two Mega Drive multi-packs. There's either a Mega Drive, Sonic 1, Sonic 2 and Mean Bean Machine combination, or a Mega Drive plus Columns, Super Hang-On, World Cup Italia `90, Streets of Rage, Golden Axe and Shinobi. It's also possible there will be other multi-game packs on the way too.
Dave Clark, Sega's UK Marketing Manager tells us that "it will be a Mega Drive Christmas. 16 bit is still the volume market."

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Nice work finding the 3 million Mega Drive source for the UK, I originally saw that figure in an old newspaper scan which I have long since lost, so its nice to actually have some hard proof again instead of having to rely on my word.

1991, somewhat higher SMS sales for France than previously posted in this thread:

http://i.imgur.com/UuAip.jpg

Only UK Mega Drive numbers reported by Sega Pro for 1992, don't see any more sales numbers in later issues, looked through to the end of 1995:

http://i.imgur.com/SwsVr.jpg

This explains why these aren't too cheap on Ebay;

http://i.imgur.com/HVNB2.jpg

There's some great stuff here, its criminal that nobody's replied yet (I didn't notice until just now).

So there's another source backing up the higher France figure, the high estimate now is going back to creating the possibility that the SMS may have outsold NES in Europe, not just the UK.

I have some different numbers for UK Mega Drive sales written down, according to the monopolies and mergers commission they actually managed to sell nearly 1 million Mega Drive in the UK in 1992 alone (though the article you posted does seem to be talking about a mad rush and sell-outs, maybe their full sales still weren't quite known yet at that time). There's a disparity for total sales as of Jan 1993 of ~200,000 - 300,000 between the two sources

I don't see how the sms could not have outsold nes in europe. sms was everywhere in europe, when nintendo wasn;t very popular at all(except maybe netherlands and france). the thing is many sms have sold after the megadrive was released. sms games could still be found in toyshops at least in germany and benelux and france untill well into 1995. nes was long gone then.

it would be real good to find information though about spanish, italian and portugese markets, as nintendo had nothing there and sega was huge there. spain and portugal especially had strong console popularty as amiga wasn't so popular there, while it was more popular in italy. I've been to all 3 countries quite a bit and it's real mekka in finding retro sega stuff. while only nintendo stuff that is easy to find are gameboys

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Originally Posted by youloute

Sorry, I was referring to "3.5 millions NES units sold in Europe."
If you add French and Britain sales, you have almost 3 millions NES. I don't think only 500 000 NES were sold in the rest of Europe. Nintendo probably had not that bad sales in countries such as Nederland, Belgium or Germany.

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germany yes. although german videogame market was a lot smaller cosnidering amiga which sold millions in germany germany became more of a videogame market much later on. nintendo was virtualy non-existant in south europe and really non-existant in eastern europe while in the netherlands and belgium the markets and countries were so small. amiga sold 50.000 in netherlands for instance and was considered popular here.

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Originally Posted by bultje112

I read in segabase

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why god why?

http://manhattanoffender.typepad.com...e506970d-640wi