Why did old computers have much larger game libraries than consoles despite having much lower sales numbers?

[JPF997]

NES - 61 million units sold - 900+ games released 

 

Amiga -  5 million units sold - 3000+ games released

 

Megadrive - 40 million units sold - 900+ games released

 

Atari ST - 4 million units sold - 2000+ games released

 

Why was this the case? Anyone that knows the answer please feel free to share your thoughts on the matter.

Edited February 9 by JPF997

[roots.genoa]

It's an easy one. To release a game on a console at the time, you needed a license and you had to pay for the carts to be produced by Nintendo and SEGA (which meant you had to guess how much your game would sell). While literally everybody could release a game on computers. There's a similar situation now since it's easier to release a game on Steam and mobiles, but your game won't necessarily sell better than on consoles since it will be harder to get noticed.

[dudeguy]

I imagine too that at the time, people who were buying computer games tended to be be older (i.e. more expendable income to drop on a ton more games). manufacturing costs come into play as well. I know it was expensive to produce cartridges versus floppy discs/CDs

Edited February 9 by dudeguy

[JPF997]

28 minutes ago, roots.genoa said:

It's an easy one. To release a game on a console at the time, you needed a license and you had to pay for the carts to be produced by Nintendo and SEGA (which meant you had to guess how much your game would sell). While literally everybody could release a game on computers. There's a similar situation now since it's easier to release a game on Steam and mobiles, but your game won't necessarily sell better than on consoles since it will be harder to get noticed.

Is it really that simple? For example LGN released so much garbage on the NES  that barely sold anything  meanwhile a PC classics like Monkey Island never released on the NES and the SNES , surely there was favouritism at play when it came to chosing which games could be allowed to release on consoles right ?

Edited February 9 by JPF997

[Crazy Climber]

Lots of reasons, but one main one is nerds. Lots of nerds in the computer programming game back in the day and they get shit done...

[newtmonkey]

32 minutes ago, JPF997 said:

Is it really that simple?

Yes.

[zzip]

2 hours ago, JPF997 said:

Is it really that simple? For example LGN released so much garbage on the NES  that barely sold anything  meanwhile a PC classics like Monkey Island never released on the NES and the SNES , surely there was favouritism at play when it came to chosing which games could be allowed to release on consoles right ?

NES is notorious in how they purposely limited how many games could be released.   They believed the crash was caused by too many games so were determined to not let that happen again.   I think each developer was only allowed to release 5 NES games per year or something.

 

But to make console games, you also needed a developer kit from the manufacturer, which cost money,  cart games were more expensive to produce than floppy disk based games.

 

To program  ST/Amiga/DOS games, compilers were readily available, as were books to teach you

Edited February 9 by zzip

[zzip]

3 hours ago, JPF997 said:

Amiga -  5 million units sold - 3000+ games released

Atari ST - 4 million units sold - 2000+ games released

What always amazed me was the Atari ST had more games than any other Atari system (perhaps not the 800/XL/XE line?) and very little of it was first-party games.   ST was teaming with 3rd party support, while Atari was struggling to get 3rd-party support  for the 7800/Lynx/Jaguar consoles.  Part of it was the ease of creating games mentioned here.

 

But for the ST and Amiga in particular there were a huge number of commercial titles that came from Europe.  The European games publishing scene was quite different from the US then.   Computers were more popular than consoles there for awhile, opposite of US.  Amiga and ST in particular seemed vastly more popular over there.    Europe/UK also seemed to have quite a few "budget" publishers that released many games.  So I think that's part of how the number of titles on those systems got so high.   

 

It was funny, as a American ST user,  I thought the system's games library was more modest.   But then a friend in college handed me a box that was stuffed with ST game disks.   All commercial titles,  most of which I had no idea were released on the ST

[scifidude79]

8 hours ago, JPF997 said:

Is it really that simple? For example LGN released so much garbage on the NES  that barely sold anything  meanwhile a PC classics like Monkey Island never released on the NES and the SNES , surely there was favouritism at play when it came to chosing which games could be allowed to release on consoles right ?

The NES was one of the worst systems when it came to releasing games. Nintendo saw the downfall of Atari as being caused by all of the not-so-good games released by third party companies and Atari doing nothing to prevent it. So, Nintendo started a campaign to stop this from happening with the NES. The put the 10NES lockout chip in the system, which prevented unlicensed games from running. Thus, Nintendo had to provide the cartridge shells and PCBs for the games. The actual games were just one one chip that the game company soldered to the PCB. The rest was Nintendo's proprietary hardware that made it possible for the cartridge to run on the NES. Nintendo's licensing restrictions were barbaric. Game companies could only license five games per year and the games had to be an NES exclusive for I think at least a couple of years. They also had to buy at least 10,000 cartridges from Nintendo, leaving all of the risk on the side of game developers. That tight licensing restriction coupled with cartridge shortages and other issues left a lot of game developers out in the cold. Some companies found ways to circumvent the 10NES chip. The most famous (or infamous) was Tengen, which was actually Atari's console game division at the time. They had game companies ready to pay them to release games if they found a way to bypass the lockout chip. The finally did by illegally obtaining the specs for the 10NES chip from the patent office. Nintendo sued them, but the case was tied up in court for many years and Tengen produced a lot of cartridges in that time. That's one of the main reasons there are as many games as there are for the NES.

 

And Sega's licensing restrictions on the Master System were worse.

Edited February 9 by scifidude79

[zzip]

2 minutes ago, scifidude79 said:

The most famous (or infamous) was Tengen, which was actually Atari's console game division at the time.

Tengen was Atari Game's console division for clarification.   Atari Corp was of course releasing console games under the name Atari.

[scifidude79]

5 hours ago, zzip said:

Tengen was Atari Game's console division for clarification.   Atari Corp was of course releasing console games under the name Atari.

Indeed. Tengen was created so that Atari could release games on competing systems without the name Atari on the games. For their own systems, this obviously wasn't necessary.

[carlsson]

Remember that EA acquired a way to make cartridges that would bypass Sega's licensing, and more or less bullied Sega to let EA publish any Genesis games they wanted. Nintendo wasn't as easy to bully.

 

Also yes, floppy disks were every man's property and tapes for the older 8-bit computers even more so. You could run a mail order company from your bedroom and advertise in some computer magazine to make sales, something that was entirely impossible if you made console games.

[carlsson]

4 hours ago, JPF997 said:

PC classics like Monkey Island never released on the NES and the SNES

Those adventure games are quite large, several floppy disks full which means a handful megabytes. Console games on the other hand were measured in megabits, essentially 1/8 of a megabyte. Thus a very large and expensive cartridge game advertised to have 8 Mbit capacity equalled 1 MByte, or 1-2 floppy disks.

 

Nintendo had the option to add CD-ROM to the SNES but as you know it never went past prototype stage.

[Wayler]

While there are good guesses here, the actual reason is that it was a mirecle that Atari St did outgame the Genesis. 

[Gentlegamer]

7 hours ago, JPF997 said:

NES - 61 million units sold - 900+ games released 

 

Amiga -  5 million units sold - 3000+ games released

 

Megadrive - 40 million units sold - 900+ games released

 

Atari ST - 4 million units sold - 2000+ games released

 

Why was this the case? Anyone that knows the answer please feel free to share your thoughts on the matter.

I bet C=64 has more games than all those combined.

[roots.genoa]

6 hours ago, zzip said:

I think each developer was only allowed to release 5 NES games per year or something.

It was basically the case, yes, but it was a bit more complex. Nintendo updated the deals several times, allowing more developers (at the beginning there was just Hudson, Konami, Capcom, Namco... only half a dozen or something) and more games per developer. It's also possible some developers could release more games than others; bigger publishers got better deals. To be fair, Nintendo was initially surprised when publishers asked to release games on the Famicom. They thought it would only last a couple of years like most systems at the time.

 

And let alone Tengen, even Konami managed to circumvent the system. They created Palcom and Ultra Games subsidiaries to release more games than allowed for instance.

[jerseystyle]

9 hours ago, JPF997 said:

Is it really that simple? For example LGN released so much garbage on the NES  that barely sold anything  meanwhile a PC classics like Monkey Island never released on the NES and the SNES , surely there was favouritism at play when it came to chosing which games could be allowed to release on consoles right ?

How do you know LGN’s sales numbers? 

[Flojomojo]

9 hours ago, JPF997 said:

Is it really that simple? For example LGN released so much garbage on the NES  that barely sold anything  meanwhile a PC classics like Monkey Island never released on the NES and the SNES , surely there was favouritism at play when it came to chosing which games could be allowed to release on consoles right ?

Yes. Cheaper media, nothing more. Going download-only is even less expensive. 

[JPF997]

12 minutes ago, jerseystyle said:

How do you know LGN’s sales numbers? 

The fact that not a single one of they're games ever shows up on an NES best sellers list is telling.

[carlsson]

16 hours ago, Gentlegamer said:

I bet C=64 has more games than all those combined.

Yes, but the C64 also had at least 12 million units sold. Some numbers go up to 17-18 million but that seems to include refurbished units etc. It would mean three times as many computers as the Atari ST. While sites like Gamebase64 contain a lot of hacks, I tend to take the number on their site (currently 30000) and divide by two, perhaps divide by three to get a reasonable number of distinct, commercial games. So yes, 10000 games with 12 million systems still is more than the 16-bit systems.

 

Again, compact cassettes were even cheaper and easier to get hold of than any form of floppy disks so a bedroom programmer could publish games in small scale and sell locally or by mail order in a completely other fashion than even Famicom publishers could. Remember that in Japan, Nintendo didn't have any lockout mechanism so the supply of Famicom games almost equals the Atari 2600 both in volume and dubious quality. The introduction of licensing and lockout probably was as much due to how the Famicom market had turned out as how the Atari market had turned out before the "crash".

[Tanooki]

The simple fact is a one liner -- Console games are easier for consumers to approach with a lower overhead to entry with price of hardware, but hardest for developers due to the development and publishing/shipping costs involved and risk tied up into it.

 

The real explanation is too long and annoying, but if we pick on Nintendo (and in turn Atari and other 1983 era and before stuff) there's valid reasons.  Nintendo saw what happened with the locally dead (NA market) more or less gaming market that fell off a cliff in 1983.  There was this huge boom of systems, games, largely games with little to no quality checks, all competing in the same space.  More and more came out, less and less sold, as quality was garbage and even you don't need the internet to eventually get word around through mouth and print and it tanked.  Nintendo rightly fearful fresh off the line with Famicom in Japan had to radically change and redesign a gaming console as a covert toy to sell it to scared shitless retail stores that lost a lot pawning off (good and largely shit) games at a few dollars a pop.  ROB was a thing as robots were hot, VCRS were the shit so the NES was made to look like one, and they only wrote 'entertainment system' not video game console on the box, even game cartridges were 'game PAKs' to blow smoke.  Coupled with a balls of steel move to promise covering all losses and buying back unsold merch worked and well...world of Nintendo was rocking it into the 90s yet without the ROB within a year as the trojan horse worked.

 

But also fearful of a re-run they setup a hard limit of games per year, it was either 5 or 6.  I've been told 6 inside and out of the industry a long time, recently in the last few years seen some revisionist stuff being 5 games a year.  So with that, while Famicom had like nearly 1100 titles, Nintendo had about 675 or so games that were licensed, far less clearly.  Developers had to pick and choose what to release, rarely was one bright enough to spread their goods under multiple publishers, and only Konami had the big brain move of faking an entire company (ULTRA) so they could crank out 10-12 games a year doubling their roster.  Not all developers were equal, and not all publishers were either.  Even if one, say like LJN who was known for being a shit pusher still had a few solid games like Jaws, and those who were known to largely do gold like RARE put out dogshit like Taboo as well so it all went around.  Because of those limits they had to be choosy, but they also had Nintendo contracts of what the license limited them to.  Largely that was paying in advance for X copies to be made (and 10K was their minimum order) and they'd take the data in mail/modem(internet, pre-internet days) and put it on chips, chips on boards, boards into plastic, and well in the end boxed shipped and retailed.  That licensee fee also was just some raw money as well just to have the right to sell at all, seal of quality on the box and all.  So out of a $30 or a $50 game they'd only probably profit 15-20% of the total money after expenses and licensing fees to NOA.  That's a big ass gamble, so making games on NES, as it was similarly for Sega, was a big expense and a risk, if you didn't go the unlicensed route and DIY your own stuff like Atari/Tengen, Color Dreams/Wisdom Tree, AVE/HES and others did.

 

When it came to computers, what's your cost seriously?  Minimally, whatever a developer valued their time making something fun to play as a cost of living expense, then the cost of uploading it to some BBS's, and then hoping your shareware got people to pay you a donation or a full price of $10-30(?) for your full ware game with the other chapters included.  That profit was nearly 100% yours after minor costs.  Even if you got a physical publisher or were one, disks/discs were cheap, cardboard boxes and paper manuals colors or not still were very cheap, even if you went (as it is now collectors box) into trinkets, maps, and other fluff...still cost less than a video game console cart.   The problem though, the cost of a good late 80s into mid90s PC was into the 1000-2000+ dollar range before you could get a $5-30 PC title, and your PC back then with Moore's Law was shit for new games after about 2-2.5yrs being another massive expense.   So it kind of went both ways, but if you had a PC already or access the games were cheaper after the initial hurdle and developers would run there since it was easier with low barrier otherwise to make a buck, lots of bucks.  While it was cheap to get a consumer into a game console, it was shit for game makers with massive risks and massive costs compared so they got much less titles.

 

That only changed when Sony tried to nail Nintendo on the CD unit and Nintendo flipped the table over canceling it, they got bitter, finished it anyways while beefing it up some and gave us the PS1.  To further revenge the old guard, they made their licensing and manufacturing(due to CDs being stupid cheap) pennies to the dollar compared to what Nintendo and Sega asked in licensing etc that's why the PS1 was the first console with well in excess into the 1000s of game releases which turned things around.  Low price console, low priced possible games, low expenses to make the games and get to market.  That's when the tables turned.  And later yet with the internet, steam, gog, etc...it's kind of 180'd again now that even a decade old PC can run last gen console stuff better with games on sale at ridiculous rates with weekly give outs too.

[spacecadet]

One guy used to be able to develop a computer game, whereas even in the NES era it would take a team of people. Plus by the NES era, licensing was really required. (Atari tried to require this, but it obviously didn't work in the end or we wouldn't right now be talking about Microsoft acquiring Activision.) Nintendo and others eventually figured out a way to at least control third parties with the "seal of quality" and similar.

 

btw you didn't mention earlier computer sales numbers, which is just as telling. The Apple II, for example, had more than 20,000 games released for it. The fact is most of those were small games developed by individuals; think stuff like "Lemonade Stand". But it goes to show how far the numbers actually fell even by the time of the Atari ST. It wasn't *just* the licensing thing, it was also just the ease of development and the expectations people had for games as hardware improved. It became more and more difficult for individuals to develop successful games on their own over time, despite the occasional one-off like Tetris. Combine that with licensing for consoles and the reason for the drop in numbers is more obvious.

 

 

[carlsson]

6 hours ago, spacecadet said:

The Apple II, for example, had more than 20,000 games released for it.

Is there proof for that number, or just an urban myth? For years, we've tried to nail down lists of those games, but didn't even get halfway. Many people seem to accept a number that has been floating around for 30+ years without any substance for being the truth. A few posts ago, I wrote that I take the GB64 number and divide by 2 or 3 to get an actual number of distinct C64 games, while the Apple II people do the exact opposite, multiply the verified numbers by 3 or 4 to get a good total.

[spacecadet]

On 2/11/2024 at 7:58 AM, carlsson said:

Is there proof for that number, or just an urban myth? For years, we've tried to nail down lists of those games, but didn't even get halfway. Many people seem to accept a number that has been floating around for 30+ years without any substance for being the truth. A few posts ago, I wrote that I take the GB64 number and divide by 2 or 3 to get an actual number of distinct C64 games, while the Apple II people do the exact opposite, multiply the verified numbers by 3 or 4 to get a good total.

Is there proof of any of these numbers, and do any of them actually mean much anyway? I wrote games for the Apple II, those "count" as much as any homebrew would for a console, even though the only distribution done was me passing around disks to my friends and some people dialing in to my AE. There were no doubt many thousands of those available for every computer, but the Apple II was not only easy to program for but it was actually taught in schools to a larger degree than other computers, so it would surprise me if there *weren't* more small, individual games written for the Apple II than other computers at the time. That said, I'm sure that most popular computers had in the tens of thousands of games written for them. And that is my basic point; games were just a lot simpler and easier for one individual to program in those days.

 

Getting back to the Apple II, I have a USB stick full of games that's nowhere near complete and it has 7,768 files on it. Those are only retail released games and a few productivity programs (though I left most out; probably 7,000 of those are retail games). So 20,000 total actually sounds low to me.

[carlsson]

Wow! You should make a list of titles of those 7000 games as the Internet only knows half of them by now.

 

When it comes to Gamebase 64, Atarimania, World of Spectrum, Generation MSX and so on, they have databases with titles to dig numbers from. Some will be duplicates or bogus entries but at least we have those named already.