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happydolphin on 06 May 2012
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@wh1pL4shL1ve_007. My pleasure.

DaHuuuuuudge said:

There is a moderately strong positive linear correlation between consoles sold and games produced to the amount of software sold on it (when compared to individual consoles, ex. Wii HW vs Wii SW, otherwise it's a different story), so yes they are proportional. However, to answer the question in the title, they are not directly proportional as the correlation coeffcient is less than 1.

Even if the two were directly proportional, correlation does not imply causation, and you couldn't say one caused the other no matter how perfectly proportional they are. Taking off my statistician hat for a second, I think it's attach rates for certain generas that causes the correlation between the two. Game developers know they can churn out a sub-par shooter on the HD consoles and make a profit with it, so that's exactly what they do (this can explain the much larger proportional units of software produced for the HD twins vs. the Wii.)

I see what you're saying about casuality, even if they were directly proportional (hypothetical), you wouldn't be able to tell which caused which (HW sales causes more SW releases, or SW releases causes more HW sales).

One thing I wanted to ask you.

What if we had the following instead for the SW releases trend:

A column chart with 6 values for each year: the number of:

1) AAA Nintendo games: 3D Mario, 3D Zelda

2) Big Nintendo hits: Mario Kart Wii, Wii Sports, Wii Play

3) Moderately successful Casual games (Nintendo and 3rd party): Trauma team, cooking mama

4) AAA 3rd party games: MH Tri, Silent Hill: Shattered Memories.

5) B 3rd party games: The Conduit, Madworld

6) Shovelware: Babyz, horsez, etc.

Would that give us more data to work with? Would the ratio of Nintendo Big Hits to shovelware be an important factor in the analysis? What if Nintendo released the M+ in a time where the number of yearly games (total and shovelware for that matter) was dwindling? Would the shovelware from previous years affect the result, still causing saturation and buyer confusion?