DS Games Selling Badly: Or Why Install Base isn't the End All Be All

[jman8]

fkusumot said:

jman8 said:

 

 My main idea, the point to take home, is that a big install base doesn't necessarily equal large sales. Then I went on and speculated that it might actually be better to release on a lesser selling system like the PSP, Wii, or PS3 (maybe even 360, but that install base may be too small). That second point is hard to prove b/c there's pretty much no way to truly test it out. But it sure does seem that devs are subscribing to the same line of thought that I'm presenting here when you consider that there are games being released for the PSP even though overall software sales are really bad.

Would they have sold better on another system? Like I said, it's impossible to know. But it's certainly not out of the realm of possibility. Go look at a PSP-only game site like psp.ign.com or something. Check out the games they're talking about on the front page. Not many of them look all that notable. If they were coming out for the DS, the DS sites may not even talk much about those games b/c there's so many other titles that look better that they can talk about. In other words, by virture of being on PSP, a system with few upcoming releases, these barely notable games are getting more coverage than they would on a system like the DS.

Look at the DJ Max article I posted above. That dev is saying the same sort of thing I am. It's been actually getting quite a bit of coverage on the PSP sites, and actually I'm kinda interested in what it is. That's a huge step forward for a game that I and many others would've completely ignored had it come out at the beginning of the year when Wipeout, God of War, Crisis Core, etc came out.

Well you used two examples from one week. You used the number 3rd and 8th best selling games of that week. You used a week that has all the kids in Japan going back to school and that is historically a low sales week. It could just be that those games were sent out to die. It seems like you picked one week and took two random titles to make a case for a point that seems cherry-picked at best and facetious at worst.

And yeah, big install base doesn't necessarily equal large sales. Okami am cry, twice (on the PS2 and the Wii).

 

 Those are all possibilities. But how much data do I need before it's not "cherry-picking." I'm not about to write a thesis on this for you. "Cherry picking" or not, data is data. Sure it's not enough to prove my point unequivocally, but does that mean you should dismiss the premise completely? Does that mean I'm wrong? All I'm really trying to do is get people to re-think and reconsider some of the assumptions they've been making. I supported my points with two sales examples and an interview w/ a dev commenting on this issue. Want more meat? How about the fact that Tales of Vesperia sold 100,000 units in a week on a system that has an install base that's only 2.5% of the DS's.