| TheLastStarFighter said:
Do you have numbers that show differently? I would say the top-10 games are a great indicator of the current video game climate. And it's not just sales of games, but quality. Games like Halo, Blops2, AC3...these kinds of AAA titles were not being launched on PS2 or XBox anymore. If you wanted something fresh or exciting like Gears of War or WiiSports in 2006 you bought the affordable Wii, the more expensive XBox 360 or the very expensive PS3. If you bought a PS2 you had to be happy with old games or the very exciting Madden and PSP port Liberty City Stories. Whoo hoo! Today if you want the latest big games you can buy a WiiU...or the cheaper alternatives which are still getting exciting stuff. |
You seem to be making two different arguments. Surely games like Halo, Blops, and AC would be more comparable to Madden on PS2 and not "fresh or exciting" like Wii Sports and Gears. The PS2 still got Madden, Fifa, Guitar Hero, Call of Duty 3, Lego Star Wars, as well as some big exclusives like FFXII, KH2, and GoW2.
As for figures, for the fiscal year ending March 2007, the PS2 shipped 193.5 million units of software. The best fiscal year the Wii ever had was 204.58million, only 5.7% higher. No other fiscal year surpassed it. The DS also only had one fiscal year that was better. 197.31 million, 2% better. So despite the PS2 shipping about 600 million more software than the DS and 700 million more than the Wii, if you looked at just the top sellers you'd have no idea. The DS had 4 20 million sellers, the Wii had 7 (with 3 over 30 million), while the PS2 had just 1. Similar situations for the PS3 and 360. They will never reach the PS2's software figures, but the 360 already has 2 more 10 million sellers, and the PS3 will likely end the generation with more as well. I mean the Wii in 2012 had more million sellers than your chart shows the PS2 had for 2006 in the US. However the Wii will probably ship about a third of the software that the PS2 did for the equivalent fiscal year.
So back to my original point, just using the top 10 to insinuate the PS2 wasn't selling much software is incredibly misleading as people were buying boatloads of software beyond just the biggest games. Now if we are talking about holiday season 2007, I'd agree with your point that new software had left the PS2 behind. By that point, the new big games were definitely concentrated on the newer consoles. CoD4, AC, Galaxy, Halo, etc.
Actually the figures I found for NPD 2006 are rather different than yours.
- Madden NFL 07, PS2, EA—2.8 million
- New Super Mario Bros., DS, Nintendo—2 million
- Gears of War, Xbox 360, Microsoft—1.8 million
- Kingdom Hearts II, PS2, Square Enix—1.7 million
- Guitar Hero II, PS2, Activision—1.3 million
- Final Fantasy XII, PS2, Square Enix—1.3 million
- Brain Age: Train Your Brain, DS, Nintendo—1.1 million
- Madden NFL 07, Xbox 360, EA—1.1 million
- Ghost Recon: Advanced Warfighter, Xbox 360, Ubisoft—1 million
- NCAA Football 07, PS2, EA—1 million
