Bodhesatva said:
To be honest, I'm rather convinced that an extremely high attach rate for a specific titles is a bad thing for the system as a whole. There is both empirical evidence and logic to back this theory. First, please notice that neither the PS2 nor the PS1 had a title that even breached fifteen percent attach rates, let alone 20 and super-duper-let-alone 25 or 30. By contrast, the Dreamcast, N64, Gamecube, and Xbox all did see attach rates this high on specific games. Since the beginning of the PS1 era, every system that's lost the race has had at least one game with an attach rate above 20 percent; both of the system's that have won the race haven't had a single game breach 15 percent. That's only 12 years of data (the data before that is quite muddled by a variety of factors, most noticably the bundling of Super Mario games in NES sales), but it's rather telling. Logically, I believe this makes sense as well. Let's run with Leo-J's example of Killzone2 selling through to 90 percent of the PS3's user base. I hope we can all agree that Killzone2 will, for the most part, sell to males, and those males will probably fall in to the 16-30 age bracket. That's an extremely lucrative bracket, to be sure. However, if 90 percent of PS3 owners buy Killzone2, and the vast majority of Killzone2 owners are in the stated demographic, then it stands to reason that 90 percent of the PS3's demographic (give or take 10 percent! :p ) falls in to the stated demographic. Having less than 10 percent of your entire audience be women of any age, males under the age of 16, and males over the age of 35 is quite restrictive. The reason that GTA didn't have an enormous attach rate (despite its monster sales) is that there were simply too many people who bought the PS2 for other reasons; if your system has a lot of demographics (young girls, young boys, middle aged women, middle aged men, old women, old men, and any division therein) then a particular game that tends to focus on a particular demographic cannot have an extremely high attach rate, logically speaking. The only real counterexample would be a game that is 1) extraordinarily good and 2) manages to appeal to several demographics at once, which is a very difficult task to accomplish. This isn't aimed at the PS3, by the way. I used Leo-J's example as a launching point; I'm only pointing out that extreme attach rates are probably a bad thing. |
