Wii U is 'definitely more powerful than 360 and PS3' - Scribblenauts dev

[Aielyn]

zarx said:

Aielyn said:

While I get what you're trying to say, you've made a mistake.

A killer app doesn't have to sell a large number of copies in order to be a killer app. In fact, if a game sells 50,000 copies, and every one of those copies is bought by someone who didn't previously own the system, and they bought the system specifically for that game, then it's a killer app... for those people.

"Killer app" is one of those subjective terms - different games are killer apps for different people.

So how are you mesuring how many systems a game sells?

As JEMC has already mentioned before me, the easiest way to identify a killer app is the impact that it has on system sales around the time that it releases. Unfortunately, it can become a problem when multiple significant games release in the same week. There is also the fact that a game can simply be the straw that sells the camel's back (heh) - a game that is just enough to make the system worth purchasing, but which isn't really the one that sold the system.

Typically, we won't actually try to identify killer apps that sell 50,000 copies, because there's no reliable way to identify them. But Smash Bros is much easier to test. We'll just look at USA numbers, because you really need to look at each one at time of launch, and I can't be bothered seeking the other numbers.

In the week that Smash Bros launched, the Wii saw more than double the sales it had seen a week earlier, up 81,012. The only other Wii title of any note to release that week was House of the Dead 2&3 Return, which sold just 11,834 copies in that week... far too few to explain the boost in Wii sales. Wii sales continued to be very strong (slightly stronger in the second week, in fact), with no major Wii release. All up, it looks like the release of Smash Bros sold the Wii to somewhere around 180,000 people in the first two weeks.