Leaked Fiscal Year ’97 Documents Reveal Saturn Sales Numbers

Sega’s fiscal year 1997 brand review documents that were uploaded to the Internet Archive this morning offer 272 pages worth of insight into Sega of America’s inner workings when the documents were prepared in March and April 1996. Among the reams of data were Saturn sales numbers from 1995 that had never been revealed before — painting an accurate picture, nearly 30 years later, of the console’s early performance in the United States.

Page 35 of the PDF shows how many Saturn and PlayStation consoles were sold in each month of 1995.

In the months leading up to the PlayStation’s launch, the Saturn sold 59,246 consoles. That lead evaporated instantly as Sony’s console debuted to 130,728 units sold while Sega pushed just 19,534 additional Saturns into consumer hands.

By the end of the year, PlayStation held a lead of more than 400,000 units — 645,793 vs. 237,317.

The document shows that Sega had projected that it would sell an additional 38,000 Saturns by the end of Fiscal Year ’96 — by the end of March 1996, in other words.

The document also shows the Saturn’s best month in 1995 was December by far, selling 119,790 consoles in that month alone.

Sales in October slumped compared to September, going from 19,534 to 14,437 despite dropping the price of the Saturn by $50 and bundling it with the new Virtua Fighter Remix.

The next price drop seemed to move the needle more, though, with sales ramping up modestly in November to 24,310 after another $50 price cut to $299.

These internal numbers cast new light on claims made by Sega at the time inflating sales, such as an Aug. 30 press release that said “More than 100,000 Sega Saturns have been sold since May 11.” Clearly, the real number was just over half that.

The document shows a sales disparity ratio of 2.7 — in other words, the PlayStation had sold 2.7 times more than the Saturn by the end of 1995. That ratio is similar, to a prescient degree, perhaps, to the ratio of money spent on marketing the two consoles as revealed on page 36.

The graph shows that, in the last four months of the year, Sony spent 2.2 times more money on marketing the PlayStation than Sega spent marketing the Saturn. The $18 million that Sega apparently spent to market the Saturn during that time is a fraction of the $50 million figure claimed in a May 11, 1995, Sega press release.

Presumably, the difference of $32 million was spent in May through August, although it’s clear now that it only resulted in a modest lead that Sony overtook in just a month.

Software sales

The leaked PDF also includes sales of Sega’s first-party Saturn software in 1995 on page 67.

It’s titled “sell-through,” which is the term for products that have been sold by stores to customers. The previous page is titled “sell-in,” a term for products sold by manufacturers to stores.

Note that this page is not saying Clockwork Knight, for example, sold 36 copies. Rather, these numbers are in thousands — Clockwork Knight sold 36,000 copies though the end of the year.

We know this because this page shows that “HARDWARE,” i.e. the Saturn, sold “237.” And on page 35 above, it is explicitly stated that Sega sold 237,317 Saturns. So page 67 and other pages like it in the document almost certainly are giving units in thousands.

The sales, when sorted from highest sales to lowest, look like this:

• Daytona USA 89,000
• Virtua Fighter 2 65,000
• Panzer Dragoon 53,000
• BUG! 47,000
• Sega Rally Championship 42,000
• World Series Baseball 41,000
• Clockwork Knight 36,000
• Worldwide Soccer 35,000
• NHL All-Star Hockey 28,000
• Virtua Cop w/Stunner 27,000
• Pebble Beach Golf 23,000
• Virtua Cop (open stock) 18,000
• BlackFire 12,000
• Astal 9,000
• Cyber Speedway 8,000
• Ghen War 4,000
• VF Remix (open stock) 2,000
• Mystaria 0

These figures likely do not count games bundled with consoles, as the page specifically calls out “free goods.” And for example, there were certainly more than 2,000 copies of Virtua Fighter Remix that reached consumer hands via console bundles — especially considering page 69 indicates that 55,000 consoles were bundled with that game, and another 50,000 consoles came with an offer to send away for Virtua Fighter Remix while getting Worldwide Soccer and Clockwork Knight for free right then and there.

On page 67, the zero copies for Mystaria could be explained by the recall Sega issued after the copyright owners to Dungeons & Dragons claimed it was too close to a D&D campaign setting named Mystara.

These figures show a shockingly low number of copies of Astal, Cyber Speedway and Ghen War were sold — all fewer than 10,000 units. While those first two games were localizations of titles made by Sega of Japan, Ghen War’s development was commissioned and paid for by Sega of America to make the Saturn look more appealing to Western gamers. Not only did that gambit apparently fail, it likely lost Sega a lot of money, too.

Daytona USA, meanwhile, was the console’s most successful game in the U.S. in 1995. Its 89,000 copies sold mean that 37%, or three out of every eight Saturn owners, bought it.

In second place was the game that launched latest into the year, Virtua Fighter 2, which shipped in the first few days of December. Its 65,000 copies represent a little more than a quarter of the Saturn’s install base at that point, a figure it was able to reach in less than a month.

Pebble Beach Golf Links starring Shiro favorite Craig “The Walrus” Stadler was apparently the lowest seller of the Saturn’s six launch games with 23,000 copies moved. But that lackluster figure still managed to beat BlackFire, Astal, Cyber Speedway and Ghen War.

The document shows that 546,000 first-party games were sold by the end of 1995, but that represented only 44% of the total stock shipped to retailers. The lowest sellers like Ghen War and Cyber Speedway were likely to blame for much of that unsold stock, although nowhere in the document is that specifically confirmed.