Pristine20 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. |
Are you sure your assessment of the psx software sales is correct? Last I heard, FFVII for one sold almost 10 mil and none of the FFs on that console fell below 7 mil.
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True, I made a mistake in the numbers, and even corrected it when another person brought it up. It still has problems. As a PSX owner, I bought Final Fantasy VII and VIII. I can reasonably assume that if I see the sales numbers for FF8, I can know that those who bought it also bought FF7. I can also assume that it was less than those who bought FF7. I can then assume that most RPG's bought are still within that FF7 purchaser amount. In other words, yes, PSX has a lot of games that sold well, but it does not add up to 100 million sales. To find out if the assumption is true requires going through, game by game and asking -are the buyers of this game represented by the sales numbers of another game? It is long, tedious, and prone to flame wars.
I have brought it up on other forums, and ended up with the same results, flame wars and no answer. If you want to message me and discuss it further, I would love to, but lets keep the comments on this section about why we don't post often.
