Kwaad said:
I am looking to classify who is buying what. The sales of 'GodFather' on the Wii amazed me. I expected it to sell much better than the PS3 version. The PS3 version has a whole 17% lead on total sales. |
There really isn't anything surprising about it at all. I discussed this a little while ago regarding the good Madden sales on PS3.
The reason? It's not about the user base, it about the user who will buy a certain kind of game. So what if the Wii has 2x as much of a user base? For asssumption's sake, say half of them are hardcore gamers (too high but anyway). These people have a certain chance of actually buying Godfather, while the rest of them, has 0% chance. For the PS3, let's say you only have hardcore gamers. Well, then, basically you have the same target audience base for both platforms.
Indeed, I'm surprised that the two figures are so close--but in my viewpoint, it's a sign that that hardcore gamers are buying into the Wii console concept.
In Wii's case, Godfather, No More Heroes, Manhunt II and this continuous trickling line of M rated titles WILL sway hardcore gamers to buy a Wii. It's funny, people keep talking about system sellers and killer apps, but in thise case, it's about footsoldiers.
This line of reasoning predicts that a platform neutral game will sell in proportion to the console numbers. I'd say... Transformers is somewhat platform neutral, just a little bit tilted towards ps3/360. That means I expect it to sell about the same ratio as the number of each consoles sold, but about 20% lower for the Wii, i.e. if Wii:PS3 ratio is around 2:1, sales I expect to be around 1.6:1.
And toward end of the year to 2008, if a game like Godfather is released, the ratio will become more and more in line with the number of consoles sold as hardcore gamers start to embrace the Wii.
By the same token, if MySims is released on both the PS3 and the Wii, the Wii sales will utterly trounce PS3 MySims sale. It makes for an easy decision for EA then--just develop for the Wii.