So is Beyond officially the flop of the year now?

[Torillian]

TheLastStarFighter said:

Torillian said:

Well I'll preface this next post with the idea that I know I have too much time on my hands.  Thank you for picking a specific example, it finally got me to look at it closely, and I even made a graph for giggles.

Below is a graph comparing the 360's NA install base at the time of launch to total Madden Sales.

As you can see you could probably extrapolate linearity to some degree from launch until maybe about 5 million sales, after that it quickly tops off even out to 35m NA install base.  So yes you can say that WiiU could have sold more games if it had a higher install base, but only until a certain point and then it'll be entirely pointless, the fanbase has been established and adding more random users will not do anything for the sales of the game.  

Love the graph!  I think it illustrates the point very well.  I think it also illustrates the need for systems (I'm looking at you Wii U, Vita) to get to a certain userbase as quickly as possible.  Those 10, 20, 30+ million users are really key levels to sell enough games to make money.

I think we're probably still not in agreement on how much userbase matters, I'd say anything over 5 million in each major reagion is just gravy, and beyond that it's a minor boost at best.  That said seems like we can both agree that it's not as simple math as "_____ sold 20k with 3m console userbase, that's the same as selling 400k on 60m console userbase.  So I think I can be happy with that at least.  

After that it's just all academic how much of an affect userbase has and when it stops mattering.  Would be interesting to try out some other series, maybe something like CoD since those are basically every year but they aren't all main numbered entries which could have an effect.  Don't want to just do sports titles though.  

And thank you for the compliment, I'll admit I was rather proud of the graph.