Wii sells six million in UK

Err....what? No, Nintendo was king of the hill until they brushed off Sony's CD idea and they went on to create the Playstation. Sega was never, and I repeat never ahead of Nintendo. The closest they got was just before Nintendo released the SNES and the NES was struggling to compete with the Genesis. But the NES still had a larger install base, lol.

Not there. Have you seen the marketshare numbers?

You would have to link me the information to believe you. I follow the game industry rather closely and have lived through the NES era and beyond and never have I heard the phrase Sega is outselling Nintendo on any capacity. You must understand Nintendo had the NES, Gameboy, and SNES running all at the same time during the early 90's period. How Sega could capitalize on Nintendo is beyond me, and without factual evidence I will not take your word for it. Beyond that Nintendo also had practically ALL the best companies working on it at the time, Square, Konami, Enix, Rare, Capcom and so on. Sega barely managed to get a few games from the top tier companies.

"Despite the Genesis's head start, its much larger library of games, as well as its lower price point,[24] market share between the SNES and the Genesis was about even in April 1992,[25] and neither console could maintain a definitive lead for several years. The Super NES eventually prevailed, dominating the American 16-bit console market,[26] and would even remain popular well into the 32-bit generation.[27]"

That's Wiki info, and at the very least it illustrates that SNES and Genesis were tied not even mentioning the market share Nintendo had from Gameboy and the dying years of the NES. With that alone one could logically see Nintendo still retained a higher market share than Sega during all of gaming history.

In Europe, the Mega Drive was the best selling console until it was discontinued in 1998.

http://74.125.155.132/search?q=cache:xNSUi0EgVlYJ:www.consoledatabase.com/consoleinfo/segamegadrive/+http://www.consoledatabase.com/consoleinfo/segamegadrive/index.html&hl=en&client=firefox-a&gl=us&strip=1

http://www.indopedia.org/Sega_Genesis.html

http://www.consolepassion.co.uk/sega-genesis.htm

woah, look at "Meet the Press" over here.

I'm confused Darth, in your own link I quote: "The Mega Drive/Genesis did fairly well in most places where it was released, mostly due to its arcade ports, sports games and platforms. Although it did not win the 16-bit war, it sure did shake things up for Nintendo and made its mark in console history." So your own link admits Nintendo remained at the top.

Further the article only tallies numbers with direct competition between the SNES and Genesis and does not take into account the market Nintendo was with the NES and Gameboy. Also, your articles only take into account the UK, which I understand is topical due to the title of this blog post, but is confusing with your initial post which seems to make the blanket statement that Sega > Nintendo, which overall never really happened.

No, the Gameboy did help their marketshare.

But my numbers show Nintendo had a 10 percent mks in Great Britain when the Mega Drive launched.

The island nation of Great Britian, Sega's predominant European stronghold ever since the early days of the SMS, was the first to receive its MegaDrives?. Originally retailing for £190 per system, the initial shipment of some 30,000 consoles first went on sale in such major British department stores as Dixon's and Rumbelow's. Its arrival in the Old World was welcome news to gamers across the continent, who had long enjoyed the fruit from the Sega vine. It was not good news for Nintendo, whose still-struggling European division was then in the process of opening a major distribution center in Grossheim, Germany. Nintendo may have dominated the Japanese and U.S. videogame markets, but it was Sega who ruled the roost in Europe. Nintendo's measly 10% market market share stood in stark contrast to its utter dominance outside of Europe, and that inescapable fact pretty much dictated its European strategy. They let Sega of Europe's new MegaDrive? go largely unchallenged while they worked on increasing their market share to a modest 25% and concentrated on more profitable products, such as their GameBoy handheld system. Thus it was that the Sega MegaDrive? took Europe by storm and would remain the dominant home videogame console until the mid-1990s. In fact, it would outsell all other Sega systems, even the 32-bit Saturn, until it was officialy discontinued by Sega of Europe in 1998. Nintendo of Europe had no choice but to let it happen. It simply did not have the resources and market share to compete.

A lot of this is sourced from Steven Kent.

But see this: "Nintendo may have dominated the Japanese and U.S." is what I'm getting at. If you just want to speak of the UK that's fine, I concede the point Sega did better in the UK than Nintendo. Unfortunately, for Sega the UK by the numbers is a smaller market than both the US and Japan.

If your point is Sega > Nintendo in the early to mid 90's in the UK only then yes I agree. But you questioned market share without naming a country (though I can see how you think it should have been implied) therefore I went on to argue against that ill-conceived notion that Sega ever had more market share than Nintendo. Because world-wide Sega never had more than Nintendo.

I see where the confusion was now. Yeah, I was only talking about Europe. I'm aware of Ninty's utterly insane marketshares of 95 percent in Japan and 92 percent in the US.

Maybe it's me, but it seemed kind of obvious where he meant.

"a blip on the radar there"

Perhaps you misread and overlooked "there". In this context, there = the UK.

But, Nintendo has changed a lot since the 90s. So it's no surprise that they are doing better in some places than in the past.

Flintstone Kids?

That jingle always felt a little ominous to me..an army of Flintstone kids.

Sad that I only know that from Family Guy. Not old enough to have heard it myself.

Yeah the Flintstone vitamins commercials. The funny thing is they still sell them and kids don't know who the Flinstones are.

True Story: Flinstones Kids was written by Marty O'Donnell, the composer for Halo.

I didn't know that. Come to find out both of his daughters actually sang on the jingle.

That's why the Bungie Podcast opens with the "Bungie Kids" theme song.

He also did 'Mr. Clean'

That song was cool.

Everytime I think of it I also remember that toys are us song.

I don't wana grow up, im a toys r us kid...

T'was a nice jingle.
I used to take Flinstones "vitamins"...

Psh... that stuff was candy to us kids...
We probably OD'd on that stuff.

Yeah, I used to pop loads of those pills.

Man was i healthy!

1. When was a Wii sold for a dollar each?
2. When was dollars used as a currency in the UK?
3. You silly goose.

"I'm proud to be british for my people to buy this console!!

/fixed

The only good thing the Wii ever did, was resurrect the (point n click/graphic) adventure genre.

I've been through about 30 games since launch, all excellent, without owning Galaxy, Mario kart or SSBB. Plus 40 downloaded games, 12 GC games. Besides maybe the N64, this is the best console i've ever owned.

well that's great for you. its just my personal opinion, to each his own.i loved my n64 but it had almost no developer support, 85% of all its great games were 1st party, had a analog stick that hurt thumbs and was just a fubar controller. but the games it did have that were good are classics that truly deserve their place among the greats. ocarina of time alone could be considered the greatest game of all time and mario64 was just a blast and deserves its place in time. but sony put nintendo in its place at that time, and that place was 2nd. the n64 was not great at all but it's games absolutely were.