okr said:
Oh, I didn't argue either that Ratchet & Clank is superior or inferior to its closest competitor. I'm just saying it's one example of a franchise which sells way less - even to devoted Sony fans, who think Sony has generally the superior output - than Nintendo's competitor games to their devoted fans.
Another example: Modnation Racers, which was praised by many Sony fans (and some reviewers) to be better than Mario Kart (which I won't argue either, as these are opinions and I never care anyway which game on what system is the "better" one) and which generally got slightly higher ratings than Mario Kart afaik, sold ~340.000 copies to a worldwide userbase of >35 million PS3 owners so far. Last week it sold around 20.000 copies worldwde, in its 6th week on the market. Why don't even the devoted Sony fans, who think Sony has the superior games, seem to buy this game?
If we use your 2nd R&C argument for Modnations Racers as well and assume for a moment that "there's no market" for cartoony racers on the system, here's two other examples for people with "evolved" tastes:
Why is Sony's own Killzone 2 with an average rating of ~90 outsold by the latest 3 CoD games on PS3? Why did inFamous, whose announced sequel is already eagerly awaited by Sony fans, sell only ~1.6 million copies?
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The answer is variety. I buy games covering a wide variety of genres, but my neighbour only buy's shooters and racing games. My neighbour is pretty much covered until the next generation because the amount of high quality shooters and driving games is high. The same thing applies to people who only buy RPG's and Hack 'n' Slash, Puzzle games and strategy games, action games and platformer's and etc. Both the PS3 and 360 have a library which covers a far larger variety of quality games, mainly because they have strong third party support.
The Wii doesn't have that amount of variety yet, you pretty much have two buyers on the Wii, the casual audience and then the more core audience. One audience buy's No More Heroes, the other buy's Carnival games and they both buy Nintendo games. Then you have Nintendo's titles limited by either being platformers, Zelda or Mario Kart. There isn't as much competition for my money.
So when Killzone 3 releases, I as a shooter fan have to pick between Killzone 3, Medal of Honour, Gears of War 3, Halo: Reach, Black Ops, Crysis, Resistance 3, Rage, Vanquish and XCom. If I only owned a PS3, I'd have 7 titles to pick from, as someone who own's both consoles it makes it even harder to narrow my purchase to a specific product. The same thing applies to many other genres on the console.
Devoted Sony fan's probably only probably cover's a few million buyer's, but then those buyer's all have different taste in games and there are enough titles releasing that their all pretty much covered. Just compare the amount of games at E3 for the HD consoles and then compare that to the amount releasing on the Wii and you can see that one completely envelopes another.
