360 will have the highest worldwide Attach Ratio ever?

[Reasonable]

goddog said:

Reasonable said:
I've never been of the mind a high attach rate is necessarily a great thing.

While used around the industry a lot, I've always felt it was always a rather misleading measure.

Looking at the figures it seems to me that a high attach rate tends to show:

1 - console has a relatively small install base

2 - the majority of its owners are core gamers that buy a much higher than average number of titles

3 - the console has a small number of very high selling titles


Now of course all measures change over time, so each consoles attach rate at a point in time will fluctuate with big releases, and with the overall growth (slowed more recently) of the undustry the potential final install base and total SW sales for this gen is higher than ever before.

But I feel the 360's high attach rate also betrays its rather modest install base vs the (I presumed desired by MS) highs of the PS2 and PS1.

My view is that it is actually healthier to see that attach rate slowly decrease in line with a rapidly increasing install base, as this would seem to be the indicator of true mass market success for a console.

In the end for the console seller it is better to sell 4Million units of a game with an install base of say 100Million than 4M units on an install base of 20Million. The latter gets you a better attach rate, the former gets you more console sales and market domination but a smaller attach rate.

 

Would it not be best to keep up the attach rate as hardware grows? profit comes  not from the console but from the games (unless your nintendo where its all gravy) working to keep both in line is good, and as long as the console maintains positive growth rate year over year its achieving its goal of gaining potential buyers.

 

the worse place to be would be a declinging year over year sales figure and a lowering attach rate, that might scare off 3rd parties

 

while a mixture of the other two  declining hardware but gaining attach, and lowering attach and gaining hardware could be read as a toss up

 

 

right now the 360 sits where it needs to be, maybe not spectacularly so, but far better then predicted in the forums of this website going as far back as   winter 06/spring 07 

 

 

Theoretically it would be better to leep growing attach rate - but historically it would be expect to fall the more successful the console becomes.

Consider when the PS2 hit 100M.  For a title to have an attach rate of 5% it would need to sell 5M copies - but not many games do that.  Normally the bigger the install base the more diverse the ownership, library of titles, etc. but the attach rate per title takes a hit in the process.

So my point is that, unless 360 pulls off a miracle, then it would be better for MS to see the attach rate actually dip a little so long as it was due to increasing install base and not loss of momentum.