In the olden days, the number of games on a system was an important consideration for prospective customers. Magazines would track this information and ads would sometimes mention numbers. Children on the street wouldn’t stop telling you how many games their console had. There was a time when the early 16 bit (and 8 bit masquerading as 16) consoles came out and only tens of games were available. This was partly the result of the 8 to 16 bit console changeover being the first generational shift in the modern game system era as we know it. The Atari 2600 to NES transition was atypical in that, at least in the US, the console game market was in ruins. Plus, as opposed to Atari during the market’s adoption of Nintendo, the NES was still making companies a bunch of money – Sega and NEC were less proven, especially in Japan and the states respectively.
Today, it’s understood that a new system may launch with only 10 or 20 or however many games but more will be coming soon, so competitors rarely boast of the number of titles available on their platform. If anything, having a huge library is almost a negative because it points to infiltration by garbage. Steam legitimately has an enormous library of good games, but it also has nearly infinite shovelware, asset store flips, AI generated trash, and mobile ports. And traditionally, the best selling console of a generation has the worst good to bad game ratio, even if it has the most good games in absolute terms.
I can think of a few solid retro consoles that did, ultimately, lack a satisfactory number of games, though only one had no serious Japanese support to alleviate the paltry western roster. Both Sega’s junior and senior systems (I just thought of that – they had four proper consoles, highschool and college are four years each… let me know when you catch up) had an unimpressive number of games released in the states, and if it weren’t illegal for American to know things about other countries, I would confirm my assumption that Europe had it even worse, though everyone had health care while waiting forever for PAL ports.
Casual hardcore gamers assume the Dreamcast had a better library than Saturn, and that’s debatably true in the West. For games stuck in Japan, however, the Saturn easily takes the moon pie. Most of the unlocalized Dreamcast games appear to be pervy visual novels, plus that one golem based puzzle game that sold 100 copies according to Famitsu. Still, all markets considered, both consoles had a decent number of games, and for some reason people keep releasing unlicensed Dreamcast games. Presumably just to cause me stress as I watch limited physical releases come and go and worry I should be buying them. Border Down is worth how much?
The N64 is the (retro) mainstream system with possibly the smallest library of games worldwide. Under 400 titles were released for Nintendo’s Folly 64 (you’ll never guess what Nintendo’s Virtual Folly and Nintendo’s Folly U refer to), which manages to be fewer than games on the Dreamcast, a console that was discontinued a few years into its life. The N64 is truly a system that deserves competitors’ mockery because of its paltry game count. And we should mock it, too.
Though we didn’t read boasting of game quantities much past the 16 bit era, Sony sure could have made hay of the fact that most Nintendo consoles have had what sad, game-deprived fans call droughts. Once 3d parties saw a better option than Nintendo (and Sega), they pulled most of their support from Nintendo consoles, leading to an almost perpetual trickle of games for the N64 onward. The GameCube, Wii, and WiiU also had game droughts because Nintendo alone could not develop enough high quality software to support a console’s ecosystem. Nintendo finally solved their drought issue by doing two things – they cannibalized one of their markets by merging consoles and portables into a single line, and they opened the floodgates to absolute garbage that now pollutes the eshop. Who can recall the bad days of game droughts when they are playing Funko Fusion Deluxe, Korean Drone Flying Tour: Deulkkoch Arboretum, and Passion Puzzle: Hentai Maidens?