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No actually it comes down to a simple fact. People are more interested in the best flying ace of world war one. If 40% of people could name the Red Baron, how many could label the number 2 flying ace? So i'll take it even further, could you name the fourth fastest sprinter in the world? Could you label the 3rd best quarterback in the NFL or the 6th best paid soccer star in the world.
The book about the second best ace could sell more than the book about the best ace if the book about the best ace was competing with 100 books glorifying famous generals or soldiers, and the book about the second best ace was the only one focusing on comedy or romance.
The third best quarterback in the NFL just set all sorts of records for merchandise sales when he was traded to the Jets. You could argue that's because of his career stats, but then again A-Rod and Barry Bonds aren't the most popular baseball players. People value more than just skill and stats in sports stars, like winning championships, being a good role model or filling an "everyman" archetype.
The best Shooter of the last generation was Halo 2 - it sold 8 million copies whilst the best selling shooter on the PS2 sold 3.44 million copies despite the huge difference in sales of the two consoles. This gap is due to the fact that the combination of Halo 2 + The Xbox was far superior than Socom + PS2. If the Wiimote was what broke Nintendo into vast untapped markets it was Halo 2 which broke the shooter into the console markets in a big way.
Actually, GoldenEye established shooters on consoles, and Medal of Honor games sold 4 and 6M copies on PS2. (Many MoH numbers used to be in the database, but are now gone.)
MoH, Halo, and now CoD4 were the big winners in a big but crowded market, no doubt. And I agree that they were winners because they were just the best.
I was talking about the Ace, not the book.
Me too.
Because on their own platform they are the big fish, because there are hundreds of competing offerings and most of them are total crap it makes sense that people would gravitate to a name like "Mario" or "Wii" on the games as a mark of quality. Once you remove Wii Sports/Wii Play you will find that 4 of the next 5 games have Mario in them and remaining one Wii Fit. 35.9 million out of 74.6 million of the million sellers were Mario or 48% of the total.
Carnival Games didn't have trouble breaking in. It's selling alongside all of Nintendo's second-tier hits from established properties like WarioWare, BBA, LCT, and Super Paper Mario.
EA on the other hand is competing in a much tougher playing field. They are competing with every other developer to produce games which edge ahead of the competition. Take EA vs Activision on the Xbox 360 in the million seller list. Activision has 3 entries in the list and 2 in the top 10. Total sales: 11.06 million (3.68 avg) . EA has 1 entry in the top 10 and 8 games on the list. Total sales: 12.93 million (1.61 average). So you can see that activision has been much more successful than EA. Especially if you use estimates that indicate a game needs to sell 1 million copes to break even.
Last gen, EA was competing primarily with Activision, and Nintendo had their own platforms, but things were different. Sony had more first party development than Nintendo does now, but EA still beat them for biggest developer on PS2. EA's MoH was one of the biggest franchises in gaming just a few years ago, but has fallen off the map, while equally sequelized Mario Party has suddenly grown to a similar status after years of shrinking relevance, and CoD, MoH's primary competitor, has grown even larger than that. In the meantime, Take-2 has had arguably the biggest "traditional" franchise in gaming, but failed to make a consistent profit, while music games, pet sims, "edutainment" titles, MMOs, and motion control have gone from niche to supporting the bulk of industry growth and the industry as a whole.
Maybe your methods could show how, year-by-year, all that occured, but if they could predict it, half the industry wouldn't be reeling right now.
Sure I will do that, but do you mind that I start with Microsoft?
Go ahead. I would read a detailed analysis of all the statements from the XBox folks over the last 6 or 7 years, to try to decipher why their business has (more or less) failed.
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