Why does Sony fail at making another mega franchise?

[Michael-5]

To Smashchu2 & CGI Quality:

All exclusive titles do boost hardware sales.

The week before God War War 3 was released, Final Fantasy XIII was also released outside of Japan, and 2 weeks before that it was Battlefield Bad Company. Yakuza 3 was also released outside of Japan the week God of War was released.

Soo starting with the week ending the 27th of February PS3 sold 234k, then the week of Battlefield (Week ending March 6th), the PS3 sold 208.5k or -11%, then the week of Final Fantasy XIII (week ending March 13th), the PS3 sold 230.7k or 11%, then the week of GoW and Yakuza (week ending March 20th), the PS3 sold 229.9k, or -0%, and the week after sales jumped due to the launch of Fist of the North Star in Japan. It jumped to 243.9k that week, or 6%. Four weeks later PS3 sales were at 148.4 k weekly, which is like a 40% drop.

We can't pin how many sales were attributed to God of War 3, but it did boost sales, maybe only by 20k, maybe by 100k, but for all future console owners, thats 1 more game to convince them to finally get a PS3.

As for Uncharted 2, PS3 sales were slowly dropping due to the wearing off of the Slim effect. Before the game sales were at 241.7k, and then jumped to 266.2k, or 10%. It may not be a huge jump, but sales do jump from games that only end in 2-4 million sales. Uncharted, Resistance, Killzone, even multiplatform games like FFXIII boost sales. It' silly to argue otherwise.

As for Smashchu's point about random weeks consoles can by up or down by 5 or 6%, thats true. Sometimes wal-mart has a sale on Wii games, people walk in and end up bying a PS3 because they were already there for a separate sale, and were considering a PS3 prior. Sometimes consoles jump because people just coincidently bought a lot of that console in one week. However games still generate hardware sales, I know people who were considering buying a PS3 for God of War 3, and when that sexy blue limited edition GT5 PS3 comes out I expect a big hardware spike, especially in EMEAA where GT games generally get half their sales.

This is however off topic.

Smashchu's original post was about Sony not being able to produce any "mega" franchises outside of GT5, and they relied heavily on third party support in past generations (FF, GTA, and Resident Evil were all Sony exclusives at one point). This is a correct statement.