| RolStoppable said: Instead of handpicking examples, you could work with total software sales and divide them by the total number of games (especially because the VGC database is incomplete). Official tie ratios for GC and Xbox are something around close to 10 and slightly more than 10, respectively (if memory serves right), so you are looking at about 200m units of software for the GC and about 250m for the Xbox. 200m/640=312k This favors the GC in terms of average sales per game, but obviously you would need to remove sales of first party and third party exclusives from the total number of software sold first (as well as substract the number of exclusives from the total number of games). The Xbox would probably come out ahead afterwards, but it's not going to be a dramatical difference; and that's the point. Both systems would post quite pitiful numbers, so there wasn't much of a business reason to drop one or the other. However, the GC was dropped. Additionally, the quality of the remaining GC ports dropped over time while the quality of Xbox ports remained stable. This will naturally have an effect on the sales performance as well, not just Microsoft's more aggressive marketing. The funny thing about the Prince of Persia example is (if the numbers you posted are in fact true) that the GC continued to get the rest of this series despite a rather big difference in sales compared to the Xbox version. The costs for porting a game weren't particulary high in the sixth generation, so if a game was built on the PS2 first (and that was usually the case), then expected sales of 100k units would usually be worthwile to justify a port. Of course, higher sales would be preferable, but the point is that the threshold for profit could be easily met. |
Okay, I guess I'll join the exercise. Let's see how this turns out.
I have here ->
GC: 79.80m units for 65 games published by Nintendo (I realize this is a flawed value but it'll have to do)
XB: 54.38m units for 90 games published by Microsoft Games Studios.
The numbers come to *drum roll plz*
GC: (200-79.80)m = 120.20m, (640-65)games = 575 games for a ratio of 120.20m/575=209k
XB: (250-54.38)m = 195.62m, (900-90)games = 810 games for a ratio of 195.62m/810=241k
tee hee
I'm not sure what to make of the numbers :) Looks like the cube's multiplats are more popular on the whole.
But now I want to make certain, that for the games that actually matter (the big games, because Ubi is a big company), that this trend is also true.
I think I could hand-pick some 5 big companies, and compare their multiplats across the platforms (over the years) and see how that goes. (That would also help to better isolate games in the market in question)
Bottom-line, if the xb sells progressively better over the gen, then there is a case for dropping support for Nintendo's platform. Unless there is a break-even value that we know, upon which profit is just profit and like you said, so long as profit is made the business case is always there.
(EDIT: Rolz, I added the vgchartz numbers underlined to give a better idea)
GC: (165.19-79.80)m = 85.39m, (665-65)games = 600 games for a ratio of 85.39m/600=142k
XB: (181.51-54.38)m = 127.13m, (972-90)games = 882 games for a ratio of 127.13m/882=144k
