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

[jman8]

Fayceless said:
If you look at the VGChartz numbers, you'll see that the DS has sold nearly 300 million units of software. (I must point out that cartridge = software, which you didn't seem to understand in an earlier post)

Wii has sold 155 million; more than XBox 360, in a shorter amount of time. Let's break that down a bit though. 20-25 million is just Wii Sports pack in. Another 5-10 million is Wii Play. Still a high number, but a tad inflated. A developer isn't going to care about Wii Sports and Wii Play sales numbers.

People buy more games for these systems. There is higher sales potential for the Wii and DS. Potential. I agree. What I'm saying with my 2 examples is some games aren't going to live to that potential b/c of market saturation. And in fact it might've been better off to come out with those games on systems with less "sales potential."

Many games will not sell well, and there are many reasons for that. It could be a bad game, bad marketing, niche appeal, each game has it's own factors for sales.

There were many flops on the PS2, just as there are many flops on the 360 and PS3. For every million seller on the PS2, there were many more games that didn't sell well at all.


But I DO agree somewhat with the first post, install base isn't everything. Shooters and sports will do well on X360. Party games and Nintendo games will see high sales on Wii. PS3 has big exclusives like MGS4 and GT5.

But to think that FPS games will only achieve decent sales on the 360 is silly. Not that I'm accusing anyone of that, I'm just pointing out that we will see decent FPS games on the other systems as well. EA's Madden All-Play is off to a good start on the Wii. It has the lowest sales of the 4 console versions, but it should still be a profitable game.

Which system will be best for RPGs is up in the air at the moment. That will be interesting to watch. They should each end up with a decent slice of that pie.