Post by supper on Aug 27, 2023 0:42:15 GMT
It's pretty far down the PCE rabbit hole, so I'm not sure how many people might have looked at the scanned issues of the Japanese magazine PC Engine Fan that were released last year. I've had tons of fun going through them and wanted to put them to practical use, so I decided to aggregate the game sales charts from all 95 issues in an effort to show which games sold best.
The result: this database. It lists every game that appeared in the PC Engine Fan sales charts, with its total number of magazine-assigned points, a list of when it appeared in the charts, and some other data like price and target platform. I've provided some basic options for sorting and filtering the data, so you can play around with it to see what was selling when.
There are a lot of asterisks attached to this data, unfortunately. I've outlined the issues in detail in the Overview section, but to it sum up: the magazine seems to have repeatedly and somewhat unpredictably changed its methodology, so looking at the scores in aggregate like this is practically useless. Galaxy Fraulein Yuna 2 is not, in fact, the #2 best-selling game of all time (sadly); it's just the beneficiary of some weird score inflation that happened during the magazine's later years. There's a note at the top of the page about not taking the numbers too literally for a reason.
That said, I don't think this data is totally useless, especially if you filter it to a specific time period. And while the raw point scores are questionable, sorting by "most chart appearances" gives some fairly informative and probably-not-totally-unreliable results about which games had strong, sustained performances (though you do have to account for the magazine's switch from weekly to monthly charts in January 1992). I'm particularly impressed by Super Momotarou Dentetsu's 57 appearances in the top 10 list over a two-year span.
It's some really niche data for an already niche console, but it was interesting to me, so maybe it'll be of interest to a few of you too. Let me know if you encounter any issues with the tool or have any suggestions for improvements (no promises I'll actually implement anything, though!).
The result: this database. It lists every game that appeared in the PC Engine Fan sales charts, with its total number of magazine-assigned points, a list of when it appeared in the charts, and some other data like price and target platform. I've provided some basic options for sorting and filtering the data, so you can play around with it to see what was selling when.
There are a lot of asterisks attached to this data, unfortunately. I've outlined the issues in detail in the Overview section, but to it sum up: the magazine seems to have repeatedly and somewhat unpredictably changed its methodology, so looking at the scores in aggregate like this is practically useless. Galaxy Fraulein Yuna 2 is not, in fact, the #2 best-selling game of all time (sadly); it's just the beneficiary of some weird score inflation that happened during the magazine's later years. There's a note at the top of the page about not taking the numbers too literally for a reason.
That said, I don't think this data is totally useless, especially if you filter it to a specific time period. And while the raw point scores are questionable, sorting by "most chart appearances" gives some fairly informative and probably-not-totally-unreliable results about which games had strong, sustained performances (though you do have to account for the magazine's switch from weekly to monthly charts in January 1992). I'm particularly impressed by Super Momotarou Dentetsu's 57 appearances in the top 10 list over a two-year span.
It's some really niche data for an already niche console, but it was interesting to me, so maybe it'll be of interest to a few of you too. Let me know if you encounter any issues with the tool or have any suggestions for improvements (no promises I'll actually implement anything, though!).