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Circana Director Posts Saturn U.S. Sales ChartsThe top video game analyst for market information company Circana posted top 20 charts that give a glimpse into the performance of Sega Saturn games in the U.S. Mat Piscatella, executive director of games for Circana, posted the charts on his BlueSky account today. He addressed taking criticism for missing the Saturn’s 30th anniversary in North America in May after posting similar charts for the PlayStation and Dreamcast when their 30th and 26th anniversaries, respectively, rolled around earlier this week. “So apparently, I missed the 30th anniversary of the NA launch of the Sega Saturn that happened on May 11th, and it’s been implied that I showed my anti-Saturn bias by not posting a chart,” Piscatella said. “Honestly, I just didn’t think about it. But here’s the list. Next time, you can just, like, ask.” (This reporter did ask , and while the chart is appreciated, the sass … not so much.)  The left-hand chart ranks the top 20 Saturn games by the dollars they generated from sales, while the right-hand chart ranks the top 20 games by unit sales — the number of actual games sold regardless of price. A note at the bottom points out that the charts don’t include games packaged with hardware bundles, which means the first Virtua Fighter, which was only bundled with Saturns and not sold individually in the U.S., is missing. The copies of Virtua Cop, Virtua Fighter 2 and Sega Rally Championship included with Saturns for the holiday season of 1996, the Saturn’s best holiday season in the U.S., aren’t included, either. The top four games are the same on both lists — Madden NFL 97 followed by Nights into Dreams, then Virtua Fighter 2, then Daytona USA. After that, the lists diverge. No sales numbers or dollar amounts are included, as is Circana’s policy, but a lot of conclusions can be gleaned from the rankings and the differences between the two charts nonetheless.  Here’s a hastily marked-up chart in Microsoft Paint depicting the differences — orange dots are games that don’t show up on both lists; blue lines are games that are the same ranking on both charts; green lines are games with higher unit sales ranking than dollar ranking; red lines are games with lower unit ranking than dollar ranking. Virtua Cop’s dollar sales ranking is a few spots higher than its units ranking, probably because it was bundled with the Stunner light gun controller for a higher price than a standard game. For a similar reason, Virtua Cop 2 bundled with the stunner appears at the bottom of the dollar sales chart while it falls outside the top 20 in unit sales. Two other games made the top 20 in dollar sales, Need for Speed and X-Men: Children of the Atom, indicating they likely sold many of their copies at full price. World Series Baseball 2 outsold its predecessor, although it didn’t make as many dollars, so more people must have picked it up at a discount while jumping on the first World Series Baseball at full launch price. Other games with higher rankings in dollars than units, like Panzer Dragoon, Ultimate Mortal Kombat 3 and NHL All-Star Hockey, probably also sold a lot of copies at full price relative to other games on the unit chart that may have moved games at discounts. That’s probably what happened with Sonic 3D Blast, NHL 97, Myst and Bug — they all appear higher on the unit sales chart than dollar sales, so they likely moved a lot of units for budget prices after their launches. An extreme example of that phenomenon seems to be Street Fighter: The Movie, which was the 11th best-selling Saturn game by unit volume despite falling completely outside the top 20 in dollars. It must have sold a lot of copies at a low price after launching in August 1995 at US$59.95. That might explain, to a lesser extent, why Clockwork Knight and NBA Jam: Tournament Edition show up on the unit sales chart but not the dollar sales chart. 1997: The bottom falls outAnother way to look at the charts is by the games’ release years — and only one game released after 1996 appears on them.  That game is Madden NFL 98, released in late August 1997. It follows up what’s apparently the highest selling Saturn game in the U.S., Madden NFL 97, from the year before. But the series suffered a precipitous drop from first place to 13th on both dollar and unit charts. The 22 other games seen on the two charts — taking into consideration that three games on each chart are unique to them — were all released in 1995 and 1996. That’s despite 71 games hitting store shelves in 1997 and another seven in 1998. (Plus Daytona USA NetLink Edition, which was only available in 1998 via sending away for it from Sega themselves.) Twelve of the top 20 games by unit sales were released in 1995, and three of the six launch titles are among them: Daytona USA, Panzer Dragoon and Clockwork Knight. That lines up with the unit sales rankings circa January 1996 that were revealed by the Sega fiscal year 1997 documents that leaked two years ago. It seems that Virtua Fighter 2 eventually overtook Daytona, though, as the holiday season fighter was behind the launch racer in January ’96. The November 1995 racer Sega Rally leapfrogged Bug and Panzer Dragoon, eventually, too. Another three 1995 games on the charts came out in the summer after launch: Bug, Myst and Street Fighter: The Movie. The last six were fall games: World Series Baseball, NBA Jam: Tournament Edition, Virtua Cop, Sega Rally Championship and Virtua Fighter 2. It was a weaker year in terms of dollar sales, though, with only nine 1995 games appearing on that chart. All three of the games on the units chart that didn’t make the dollar chart are 1995 games: Street Fighter, Clockwork Knight and NBA Jam. Meanwhile, the three games on the dollar chart that didn’t make the units chart were from 1996: Need for Speed, X-Men and Virtua Cop 2. Indeed, 1996 was no slouch for the Saturn in the U.S. — the top two games on both charts, Madden NFL 97 and Nights into Dreams, both released in 1996, and four of the top six in unit sales did, too (Sonic 3D Blast and Tomb Raider). Not as many 1996 games cracked the unit sales chart, though, at just seven. That number includes NHL 97, World Series Baseball 2 and Ultimate Mortal Kombat 3 in addition to the aforementioned Madden, Nights, Sonic and Tomb Raider. Notably, while Sonic 3D Blast was eighth in dollar sales and fifth in unit sales, the two Sonic games released on Saturn in 1997 failed to chart. There’s no sign of Sonic Jam or Sonic R. The two most prominent Saturn fighting games of 1997, Fighters Megamix and Last Bronx, also failed to chart after Virtua Fighter 2 took third place on both lists and many owners got Virtua Fighter 1 with their consoles in 1995. Third-party successIt can’t be said that third-parties made no money on the Saturn, from the looks of these charts. Of the 23 unique games, 10 of them were published by third-party companies; that is to say, companies other than Sega.  Electronic Arts saw the most success, with four games: Madden NFL 97 and 98, NHL 97 and Need for Speed. Midway got two games near the top of the Saturn rankings with Ultimate Mortal Kombat 3 and NBA Jam: TE, as did Capcom with Street Fighter: The Movie and X-Men: Children of the Atom. There are also games from Eidos (Tomb Raider) and Sunsoft (Myst). And with third-party games populating the dollar chart more than the unit chart, their titles likely sold at full price more than the titles Sega published. But on the flip side, only one third-party game made the top five of either chart. And only two third-party titles made the top 10 in dollar sales. So from that point of view, Sega still dominated software sales on the Saturn. And third-parties apparently didn’t find much initial success, with only three of their games on these charts releasing in 1995: Myst, Street Fighter and NBA Jam: TE. Comparisons with JapanHow do these Saturn sales rankings compare to those in Japan? According to Sega Dreamcast magazine in March 2000, as compiled and posted by TheBigO2 on the SegaXtreme forums two months ago, here are the Japanese top 20 by unit sales:
The American and Japanese unit sales charts share six games in common: Virtua Fighter 2, Sega Rally Championship, Virtua Cop, Daytona USA, Nights into Dreams and Panzer Dragoon. One caveat is that Virtua Fighter 1 also is on the Japanese list — it was sold separately there, while it was bundled with consoles in the U.S. so Circana didn’t count it on their chart. So in a way, there are seven games in common between the two territories as far as most owned Saturn games. Of the 13 other games in the Japanese top 20, seven of them never released outside Japan. Those are Sakura Wars 1 and 2, Super Robot Wars F and F Final, Shin Megami Tensei: Devil Summoner, J.League Pro Soccer Club o Tsukurou 2 (“Let’s Make a Pro Soccer Club 2”) and Grandia. The six that did come West but didn’t make the U.S. top 20 charts are mostly fighting games — Fighters Megamix, Fighting Vipers, Enemy Zero, Night Warriors: Darkstalkers Revenge, Virtua On: Cyber Troopers and Street Fighter Alpha 2. Of the 14 games in the U.S. top 20 units chart that didn’t make the Japanese one, four of them weren’t released in Japan: Madden NFL 97 and 98, NHL All-Star Hockey and Ultimate Mortal Kombat 3. Technically, World Series Baseball 1 and 2 weren’t, either, but they had earlier Japanese equivalents on which they were based in the Pro Yakyuu Greatest Nine series. The other eight that released in both countries but found more success in America than in Japan were Sonic 3D Blast, Tomb Raider, Myst, NHL 97, Street Fighter: The Movie, Bug, Clockwork Knight and NBA Jam: TE.
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