Why did MGS 4 fail to move consoles?

[Millennium]

It's not so much that MGS4 failed to move consoles; it's that it moved many of those consoles long before it was ever released.

Go anywhere that gamers gather, and look at the records of old discussions from before MGS4's release. Go back as far as you can. Even around the time of the PS3's release, MGS4 was stated as one of the top reasons that people were buying PS3s (FFXIII and GTA4 were the other most common reasons: again, from long before the games were released). These games hadn't even been released yet, but people bought them almost as if they were investments: get it now, enjoy your games later.

This behavior wasn't unique to the PS3, though. XBox 360 users did it too, with Halo and GTA4 being common reasons that people bought consoles before these games were even released. The results were predictable: when the games were released, there was a quick boost in hardware sales, but then a crash back to about the levels they'd been before. It's not that these games failed to bump sales permanently, but that the bump had already happened long before. This is great for early console sales, but it means that the era of the system-seller game is over. You can no longer reliably track beyond the couple of weeks surrounding the system's release exactly what increases are due to what blockbuster games.

Except, that is, on the Wii. For some reason, Wii users don't do this. They wait for their favorite games before buying the console, just as console buyers used to do in previous generations. Again, go anywhere gamers gather and look at the records of old discussions: people waited for MP3, then they waited for SMG, then they waited for Brawl and MK:Wii.

But this all leads to yet more questions. Why did gamers shift to console-as-investment on the HD consoles? Why didn't they shift to this behavior pattern on the Wii? I don't know. It would be interesting to find out.