UK charts week 47

[Inigo13]

Zucas said:

Inigo13 said:

The term "legs" has been around well before video games. It was mostly tied to movies grosses. If a film made a lot of money compared to its opening weekend take, it would be deemed to have legs. For instance, Titanic opened to around $28.6 million but ended up making $600 million domestically. Those are huge legs. Not only because it continued to make money for a very long period of time, but also because it made a great deal of cash compared to opening weekend. Over 21 times the opening weekend take.

Changing the term to fit your own private definition is really silly. De Blob most certainly has legs. It started off very slowly, but gained momentum. Putting some disclaimer that the game needs to sell a certain amount per week goes against the idea of "legs". It's not how many games sell every week, but if it stays at a constant pace that determines legs. The biggest indicator of that is the comparison of opening week to overall sales.

With your new changed definition, only blockbuster games can achieve legs.

But if you only do it relative to the opening week then you obviously exclude a lot of big games.  Hence a game can open to 10,000 units and end up selling over a million and that's 100 times more than the opening weekend.  But a game that opens to 1 million and ends up selling 10 million is only 10x.  Does that mean that one titles has better "legs" than the other.  I'd argue that this observation is completely meaningless because then only games with slow starts can have relatively big legs which will only include Wii and DS titles.  But for the big titles and especially big mainstream titles they are excluded. 

But the main flaw with this definition is it excludes time and time is important when it comes to legs.  With your cases a game could sell 1,000 it's first week and 5 years later it will end up being at 20,000.  That's 20x its opening weekend but do we really consider that  legs.  I'm sure a constant pace of about 10 a week is nice but do we really consider that legs?

Thus why argue for something that isn't purely relative for the opening weekend but relative to time, week by week analysis over a long period of time, and how it performs in the holiday season subsequent from the first along with that of first week.  You are able to get a much better definitnion and it excludes those who are merely capitalizing on poor starts.  Indeed if it can have legs if a poor start did occur but a definition shouldn't just be because of the fact that it had a poor start. 

Geez by this definition what Wii game wouldn't be considered to have legs... word itself would become oversaturated and meaningless if this were the cases.  I'm not changing the definition just correcting a potential primitive use it may have.

And by your definition, what blockbuster videogame wouldn't have legs? They are almost always still selling at some level a year after release. It's just the nature of the business. Bottom line is you're taking an established term, and changing it to meet your connotative meaning.

I see no problem with saying Halo has legs for a Blockbuster title. As you could easily compare its sales overall to the opening week, and show how it did comparably better than most similar blockbuster titles.