Xbox360, Wii, PS3, and software

[Bodhesatva]

naznatips said:
eugene the fact that SMG was released on the Wii was MORE than canceled out by both Assassin's Creed and CoD4 on the 360. In fact, those 2 games made a much larger contribution to 360 software than SMG did to Wii software. Your point is moot, and you don't seem to understand anything going on in this topic. The 360 does not have an overwhelming software attach rate advantage and SMG's release in no way stops Bod's post from proving it beyond any reasonable doubt.

I agree, but there really isn't any point responding to him now.

He's just going to keep drowning us in statistical noise and hopes that confuses things enough that no conclusions can be drawn. Which is more important, SMG or CoD4+Assassin's Creed? How do we weight the importance of Halo 3 for the 360's October software sales, since it had come out only 5 days before the month began? What about other 360 games, such as Orange Box and Ace Combat and PGR4? Other Wii software such as Mario and Sonic?

There's no way to weight this precisely equally, and Eugene is simply going to drown the conversation in statistical minutae to obfuscate. I'm just going to state the three key points one more time:

1) The PS3 software compared to 360 software in Europe is selling at a near 2:1 clip relative to install base, while the Wii software has been selling at a 1.8:1 clip, for the last 4 weeks

2) In America, the 360 software market was 3-5 percent higher than their hardware marketshare last month, and it looks likely that trend has continued (again, based on the fact that Microsoft opted NOT to comment on the issue, it's likely they did not outsell PS3/Wii software combined, and thus have something like 47-50 percent software marketshare compared to 45-47 percent hardware marketshare)

3) According to Ioi, the Wii has outsold the 360's worldwide software totals for 4 weeks running, and it hasn't even been very close (which is to say, even assuming Ioi has made significant percentage errors, it's unlikely the 360 has sold more).

If the 360 were a software selling behemoth that could not possibly be matched, this wouldn't be happening. As a last point, consider that the current wordwide hardware marketshare looks like this:

1) Wii 42.8
2) 360 38.2
3) PS3: 19.0

This week, worldwide software marketshare looked like this:

1) Wii: 44.8
2) 360: 33.8
3) PS3: 21.4

Even granting that Ioi may be off by some percentage (the EU software sales are quite new, after all), and even granting that the last four weeks may have been particularly good for the Wii, as Eugene has claimed, the fact that the Wii is able to more than compete for software marketshare is telling. If the 360 is really an unstoppable software behemoth, should it ever look like this? Particularly at Christmas, the period with the highest software sales for the year worldwide? I stand by my claim that the 360 has, at best, a 5-10 percent advantage in total software sales per-system compared to the Wii, and probably even less when compared to the PS3, worldwide. Does that mean the 360 sells tons of games? Yes. Is it putting the Wii and PS3 to shame? Absolutely not, and that's really the central point of this entire thread. The difference in software totals/hardware totals really isn't all that big worldwide. For any of the three systems.