binary solo said:
That's the wrong way to look at things. A game like Beyond is has niche appeal as it's not a mainstream style of game. The niche of gamers that are potential buyers of Beyond is probably about 3 million PS3 owners at best. So week 1 Beyond sold to about 10% of it's market potential. I don't know enough about W101 to be able to characterise how niche of a game it is, but I suspect it's not a style of game that direclty appeals to the Mario fans. And one musty also consider that the most wildly popular games on PS3 (and 360) have sold to only about 15% of the install base. So 15% of the install base looks to be the upper limit of sales potential for PS3 games. In that context 300K week 1 is OK. Also with a game like W101 it doesn't have a lot of competition for the attention of Wii U owners. Beyond has hundreds of games with at least a 5pt metacritic advantage over it to compete with, let alone the whole library of PS3 games. W101 on the other hand is the 27th best Wii U game by metascore on a system with a library of 75 games (that have metascores). A game like W101 *should* be selling to a higher % of Wii owners than it has. And I entirely blame Wii U owners forits flop status, because objectively W101 should be selling way way better than it is. |
I don't think looking at what the percentage of the user base that a game pushes into is a bad way of looking at the sales of a game. There may be a modifier in that a PS3 or Xbox 360 game doesn't need the same percentage of push into the user base that the Wii U does to be successful. The Wii U may need a higher percentage and the Xbox 360 and PS3 may need a smaller percentage, but there's one problem.
We don't know the costs. The overall way of determining whether or not a game is a success is whether it's profitable. If we knew the cost of investment to make the game, then the amount of profit the game made after all costs and expenses, then we'd be able to determine the exact costs. Not all games cost the same.
