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RVDondaPC on 15 October 2009
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Killergran said:
RVDondaPC said:

No difference? What are you talking about? 1 year is 1/3 of the total life span of the Wii and the PS3. How are you saying that that makes no difference?

Let's just look at a huge franchise like Fifa soccer from EA for an example. Overall the Fifa Franchise has sold over 5.98 million copies on the XBOX 360. Compare that to the lifetime sales on the PS3 which is 4.97 million copies sold. That's a 1 million unit drop off in sales. Using your logic you would think that the XBOX is a much more popular console for the Fifa franchise. However if you compare the releases to each other the PS3 outsold the XBOX 360 with Fifa 08, Fifa 09, and now Fifa 10. All by a rather large margin of 220.000, 340.000, and in one weeks sales 213,000 respectively. The only reason the 360 sold more total was because of the extra FIFA games that were released in the extra years time. 

The same could be said for every franchise EA has, which is a lot. And could also be said for all three publishers in this thread. I'm not saying the PS3 outsells the 360 with every game like it does with FIFA, there are plenty of game which the 360 outsells the PS3 but even those totals would be greatly distorted ratios because of the extra year of releases. The whole point of analyzing data is to determine results and influence decisions and your information not only distorts results but it will also misguide decisions. So again thank you for the hard work, interesting to note, but very useless except for the last section of data because that information is independent from each console. 

It makes very little difference now. 25 million xbox 360 software was sold before the PS3 and the Wii were released. Last year the xbox 360 sold 110 million, and the total is well above 250 million. That means that the period you are so concerned about is about 10% of the total sales of the xbox.

You could argue that one should instead discount the last year of period, because software sales are rising in time with the userbase. I personally do not think that software and hardware of the same generation exist in a bubble. What happens to the PS3 this year also affects the Xbox this year, not last year. And what happened to the Xbox last year will not suddenly be an issue for the PS3 this year.

So, if you are simply aware of the fact that the xbox actually has a years lead, these numbers can be used to draw a couple of nice conclusions.

 

So what conclusions are those? You can theorize time and time again but I gave you a concrete example of how your data paints a flawed picture. 50% of EA's sales this gen have been on the 360, while around 25% have been on the PS3. You would have one believe that on average an EA title will sell twice as much on the 360 as on the PS3 but that is grossly inaccurate. Infact the Last two EA titles to be released (FIFA10 and NFS:S) have both sold more on the PS3 than the 360. Even a franchise like Madden which is greatly skewed towards the American market and thus the 360, still doesn't even come close to reaching the sales ratio's(39% increase compared to your data which is a 100% increase) that your data has one believe. So I ask you what conclusions can you come up with using this data? 

Even you alluded to in your own post that you can't determine how much to discount the one year head start. So how can you even start to analyze these numbers with such a big variable being unknown? The only thing you can do is go game on game sales to determine anything of use.