How popular was the Mega Drive in Japan? A comparison of people per unit
I hear things on this forum all the time about how the MD bombed in Japan. We all know the numbers sold but I've decided to put it in perspective by calculating the number of people per unit sold. I will limit this to the (very) general target demographic of males aged 5-29. I will also only look at sales to 3/95, which is when the MD was basically replaced by the Saturn in Japan. Yes, I know a lot more units sold after that in the US, but the idea of this is to get a sense of how many units were around during the height of the 16-bit era in Japan.
Japan:
Number of males aged 5-29 in 1990: 22.03 million
Number of MDs sold up to 3/95: 3.55 million
Number of SFCs sold up to 3/95: 14.47 million
1 MD for every 6.21 people in the target demographic.
1 SFC for every 1.52 people in the target demographic.
North America:
Number of males aged 5-29 in 1990: 52.09 million
Number of Gens sold up to 3/95: ~16 million (rough estimate based on Famitsu article)
Number of SNESs sold up to 3/95: 15.62 million
1 Genesis for every 3.26 people in the target demographic.
1 SNES for every 3.33 people in the target demographic.
There are, of course, a bunch of other factors at play and this is a very basic analysis. The truth is that the MD's target age demographic in Japan was more like 10-19, which would mean 1 MD for every 2.7 people in the target demographic. But the SFC obviously had a much wider demographic so I've left it as is for reasons of comparison.
The point of this is to show that the MD in Japan was reasonably common. It's hard to argue that it was a failure or niche machine when looked at this way.
Thoughts?
Sources:
Sega sales: www.neogaf.com/forum/showthread.php?t=981407
Nintendo sales: http://www.neogaf.com/forum/showthread.php?t=701305
US census data: http://www.census.gov/popest/data/historical/1990s/
Japan census data: http://www.e-stat.go.jp/SG1/estat/Li...25191&cycode=0