About console-tally
A public, automatically-updated dataset and dashboard of video game console unit sales. Built because no free equivalent exists, and because sales-figure reporting is scattered across quarterly PDFs, SEC filings, Japanese-language charts, and second-hand analyst quotes.
How it updates
- GitHub Actions runs daily at 08:00 UTC, checking Famitsu and a few RSS feeds for new mentions.
- A separate weekly workflow (Monday 09:00 UTC) re-pulls Nintendo IR, Sony IR, SEC EDGAR, and Wikipedia.
- When new data lands, the workflow commits it to this repository and rebuilds the site.
- A third weekly canary job runs plausibility checks (monotonic cumulative units, recency) and opens a GitHub Issue if anything looks off.
Honest maintenance expectations
This claims to be "low-maintenance", not zero. Realistically a scraper will break when a source site is redesigned — roughly once or twice a year per source. Dependabot handles routine version bumps. The canary surfaces data-quality regressions via an auto-filed issue. Budget about an hour a month.
What's estimated vs. reported
Officially reported: Nintendo Switch family, Nintendo 3DS, Wii U, PlayStation 5, PlayStation 4 (historical only).
Analyst estimate: Xbox One, Xbox Series X|S, Steam Deck, ROG Ally, Legion Go, MSI Claw, AYANEO, GPD Win, OneXPlayer, PS Vita (lifetime).
Not yet tracked in this region: Americas, EMEA, and APAC-ex-Japan breakdowns are sparse. Japan has the most public weekly data.
Using the data
All data files live in data/ of the GitHub repo and are served alongside this site:
consoles.json— every console with its full fact historyregions.json— per-region leaderboardsmeta.json— source inventory + last-seen timestampsconsoles.sqlite— the same data as an ad-hoc-queryable SQLite database (Datasette-compatible)
Licence
Code: MIT. Underlying figures: attributed inline to their original sources. Wikipedia-derived text is under CC BY-SA 4.0.