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Xen said:
Alfred909 said:
Aloha,

I guess I am a lurker as well. I am an anthropologist who studies videogame culture. I am sure you have noticed how threads get killed. Specific people who want to be right more than have a discussion begin to post, more and more, to the point that they drown out anyone enjoying the discussion. As the discussion begins to break away, anyone still wanting to discuss ends up getting shriller, and shriller. If someone decides to quit posting the negative posters consider it a win. In the end, it is just them on the thread, congratulating each other. This thread arc tends to last 20 to 30 pages. There are exceptions like the John Lucas thread, with nearly 300 pages, but that is because some of the discussers are willing to write out 30 page retorts to each other. Most of the other commentors have left or gone shrill.

This is really sad since the use of numbers could have an interesting discussion. PSX sold 100 million systems, but its top selling game was 4 million. PS2 was the same with 160 million systems, but the top selling game was 18 million. Thats a ton to parse through, and open up a discussion about what is going on. Heck, looking at the sales numbers vs how we think it happened for the SNES vs Genesis discussion would be amazing. I'm not about to start those discussions though because of the problems you have.

Not gonna comment on anything else, but look at FF VII sales for example.

http://www.vgchartz.com/platform/5/playstation/

You are right, I got the numbers wrong. Gran Turismo  sold at 11 million, and Final Fantasy sold at about 10 million. Trust me when I say, I am just as amazed at the problem with the numbers. But I won't go any further.  To really dig into it means looking at the games in a way to see how many gamers there were for this system, and then how there is such a large disrepency.