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Forums - Sales Discussion - Millions of Consoles Sold VS Game Library Size

JRPGfan on 17 July 2017
vivster said:
mirf said:
It is wrong to divide by number of sold consoles. Such platforms like Saturn or Gamecube have advantage of very few sales and most games of its library are cheap garbage that has been released for all platforms. I think it would be indicative to divide each platform's total games by years when developers were being active but not userbase.

It's perfectly alright for this comparison. The high ratios on console with very small userbases just strengthen the point. I doubt anybody thinks any better of the GC or DC when looking at those ratios.

Every gaming platform has trash software, just look at the inflated PS1 ratio.

Id say the big numbers are the take aways.

Dreamcast at 77 score is telling, it was the last system they sold... it basically killed sega as a console manufacturer.

Look at the first Xbox, at 42.4 score... again not really a well recived console.

The XB360 is where MS fixed things and sales went well again and, thats back to a 14.2 score.

 

So basically if your console scores over 30 in this "metric" your console is in a dangerzone.



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vivster on 17 July 2017
JRPGfan said:
vivster said:

It's perfectly alright for this comparison. The high ratios on console with very small userbases just strengthen the point. I doubt anybody thinks any better of the GC or DC when looking at those ratios.

Every gaming platform has trash software, just look at the inflated PS1 ratio.

Id say the big numbers are the take aways.

Dreamcast at 77 score is telling, it was the last system they sold... it basically killed sega as a console manufacturer.

Look at the first Xbox, at 42.4 score... again not really a well recived console.

The XB360 is where MS fixed things and sales went well again and, thats back to a 14.2 score.

 

So basically if your console scores over 30 in this "metric" your console is in a dangerzone.

You could also correlate the ratios to the hardware power of the console. Apparently a powerful console no matter their userbase will still gat a certain baseline of games. The Sega consoles, GC and Xbox were all particularly powerful within their generation.

Maybe because it's easier to port onto strong hardware? I guess we'll never know.



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etking on 17 July 2017

Really interesting. All failed consoles, including SAT, DC and Xbox (outside of the US), have the highest numbers. The nubers also seem to indicate the level of failure.



vivster on 17 July 2017

That means even if you're generous and say that Steam has about 100m active users, it would still lead the pack with around 160 games per million users. God bless no curation.



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Lawlight on 17 July 2017

I don't think that's a meaningful metric, just because the numbers are skewed in favour of the lower selling consoles.



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JRPGfan on 17 July 2017
etking said:

Really interesting. All failed consoles, including SAT, DC and Xbox (outside of the US), have the highest numbers. The nubers also seem to indicate the level of failure.

"Variety is the spice of life"

Big games libraries will allow a consol to stretch and reach further (market wise).

Most of the consoles that did "really well" are in the 14-16 range.

Anything above 30, seems to have done poorly.



trent44 on 17 July 2017
vivster said:
JRPGfan said:

Id say the big numbers are the take aways.

Dreamcast at 77 score is telling, it was the last system they sold... it basically killed sega as a console manufacturer.

Look at the first Xbox, at 42.4 score... again not really a well recived console.

The XB360 is where MS fixed things and sales went well again and, thats back to a 14.2 score.

 

So basically if your console scores over 30 in this "metric" your console is in a dangerzone.

You could also correlate the ratios to the hardware power of the console. Apparently a powerful console no matter their userbase will still gat a certain baseline of games. The Sega consoles, GC and Xbox were all particularly powerful within their generation.

Maybe because it's easier to port onto strong hardware? I guess we'll never know.

Hardware power is difficult to quantify on a standardized scale. The best I could imagine is some sort of composite score of a console relative to the composite score of the best PC build available the day that console launched.

But, even then composite test methods arent even entirely indicitive of hardware power across day and date hardware with a different OS... Much less, the vast span of achitecture changes that have occured across all the console generations, and thats before even getting into game engine optimizations for each platform, etc.

In a sense, we would probably only have the same general guess as to which console was more powerful that each other without a proper standardized scale to compare ratios of how much that effects things.



trent44 on 17 July 2017
JRPGfan said:

Games (in library) pr Million (hardware consoles) is such a weird metric.

What is the use of it?

 

So systems with "low" scores pr million, where systems where consumers on avg had more games to choose from?

So the better systems would be the low scores.

On the other hand.... it says something about how willing consumers are to in turn support a system, with games buys, even if they dont have much to choose from (a high score).

 

It looks like Dreamcast basically didnt have many games, dispite their fanbase loveingly buying the hardware.

Its def. a standout at 77.7 pr million, when most others are 10-15 pr million.

It is just a very basic metric for ballpark estimating a game library. Lets say I predict a console will sell 100 million hardware units, I could then estimate its final game library would be between 1100 games and 1600 games.

If the console hardware sells a low volume then it becomes much less predictable and the metric is not as applicable for general estimations.

Now, we could explore more metrics related to game library size...

mirf said:
It is wrong to divide by number of sold consoles. Such platforms like Saturn or Gamecube have advantage of very few sales and most games of its library are cheap garbage that has been released for all platforms. I think it would be indicative to divide each platform's total games by years when developers were being active but not userbase.

I am not sure where one would find developers active but not userbase...

But, the total number of games in a console's library, compared to say... the total number years the console was being manufactured, is perhaps an interesting metric we could look at.



trent44 on 17 July 2017
Mnementh said:

@OP: Thanks for the thread. Which is your source for overall game library size?

I used Vgchartz.com for total hardware sales of each console, and wikipedia.com for game library sizes, which can be found on each of the "List_of_(console)_games" pages.

If there are better and equally accessable sources that you know of, I would like to know.



trent44 on 17 July 2017
vivster said:
I'd be really interested in the handheld ratios.

Hmm, lets see...

Nintendo Handheld Consoles

GB + GBC - 13.6 Games Per Million

GBA -          13.2 Games Per Million

DS -            12.0 Games Per Million

Sega Handheld Consoles

GG -            34.2 Games Per Million

Sony Handheld Consoles

PSP -          10.8 Games Per Million

Interstingly, the ratios seem to be about the same.

Now, GB may have been a lower or higher ratio than GBC, but I have never seen the hardware sales seperate besides very very vague estimates.