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Attach rates typically diminish as the user base increases though.

Users who have owned their consoles longest (the early adopters, typically the core demographic which always buys the most games) will just about always have purchased the highest number of games unless they just stopped using the console.

Past a certain point, the mass consumer point, where consoles are less than $200, many of the new buyers will only end up buying a handful of new games over the life time of the console, lowering the ratio.

They may end up picking up a bunch of used games (budget gamers), but these don't effect attach rates as calculated by hardware companies.

Technically, all those used games sitting in GS, EB and E-bay still count as being "attached" to the console of the original buyer. Meaning, someone could have bought 20 games, sold 15 of them, but still be "counted" as having bought 20 games for that one console giving them an attach rate of 20:1 in the eyes of the console manufacturer.

But the guy who buys those 15 used games, regardless of whether he kept them or traded them back in, they would still have an attach rate of 0:1, assuming he never bought any new games.

They actually bring the overall platform attach rates down as a result, and so typically, the console that sells the most units, paradoxically has the lowest attach rates at the end of the generation. It still translates to significantly more soft units sold overall than the runner ups though.

Maybe a better way of measuring soft attach rates would be on a month to month basis (soft units sold @ month/ hardware units sold @ month), but that overall ratio has always been the first number publishers look at in determining how well games have been selling on a given platform.