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TWRoO on 21 May 2010
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MikeB said:
TWRoO said:
MikeB said:

So last fiscal year the PS3 sold more software than the XBox 360 despite Sony so far sold 4.47 million PS3s to retail than the XBox 360 shipped.

But the XBox 360's best year of software sales was during Sony's fiscal year 2009 when the XBox 360 sold 105 million software units and the PS3 sold a little less with 103.7 million software units.

If we compare the install bases for that year, the PS3 was at 22.7 million units sold to retail. The XBox 360 at the time was at 30.2 million units:

So 105 / 30.2 = 3.48 for the XBox 360
And 103.7 / 22.7 = 4.57 for the PS3

So that's why I stated that year PS3 owners buy relatively more software compared to XBox 360 owners, sadly I got flamed for saying something insightful by the usual suspects back then as well.

And where did you get the X360 software shipments from?

I tracked fiscal year / quarter reports in the past when I made those statements, but the Source wrote a summary here (used it for quick reference this time):

http://www.vgchartz.com/forum/thread.php?id=108718&page=1

Now that is where this whole thing is flawed.... Microsoft doesn't give shipment data in their reports for total software, the only thing they have given is a mention of the NPD attach ratio.

The Source himself said this:
---"We don't have sold X360 shipment information, but my guess it has a high-6 attach rate worldwide (its ~5 ish in EMEA and Japan going by our data) so Wii + PS3 + X360 SW has likely peaked too. My guess is it has gone something like this"---

I'm also not sure why The Source used the European data from VGC as a good measure of what the X360 attach ratio (still sales) will be here, given that we know it is still incomplete.

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There is also the problem of you comparing it to shipment data... for example, the X360 attach ratio for the USA for NPD is 8.8 if I recall correctly, the VGC figure for Japan will be accurate enough, but sales there are small enough not to make much difference anyway... but the VGC figure for "other" regions is currently just 6 (The Source said ~5 for some reason, not sure why).

By shipment figures for Nintendo Wii, it's attach ratios are 8.9 in Americas, and a 7.3 in "other" regions.... I may be a Wii fan but I harbor no dillusions as to it's attach ratios being higher than the X360 (especially not by so much in Europe)

Those figures should hopefully show you how innaccurate it is to compare sales attach ratios and shipment attach ratios.... thinking about it logically, the stock levels of games are far far higher than that of consoles. A general estimate on this website is about 1 million X360s "in stock" at one time (I think this can easily go between 500k and 1.5 million without anyone noticing the difference in stores) if there are 1 million console units floating about, yet generally a single store (i'm thinking GAME in UK here, perhaps American stores are bigger) will not hold more than a dozen or so units, but they hold a LOT more than 8* the number of X360 games (or whatever multiplier is the current sales attach ratio)

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What you should be doing is comparing two like sources (which without paying for NPD and GfK stuff will just leave VGChartz) for which the X360.

Both consoles actually have very similar attach rates though (games/system/average time of ownership) which is a far better metric as it helps eliminate the advantage the X360 has from the year headstart.