Is shrinking market size all that bad?

[JEMC]

Dr.Henry_Killinger said:

JEMC said:

With a smaller market, what will happen is that either publishers invest less in the games, opting for either less games but as big as they are now (AAAs) or as many games but with smaller budgets (so worse graphics and/or smaller worlds, maybe even shorter). Whatever the choice they make, we lose.

You're just imagining the worst cases.

Lets say, for sake of example, we went from 260mill last gen to 200 mill this gen with PS4 80-100, XB1 50-70, and Wii U 30-50.

Last Gen: 260 million

Pos	Game	Platform	Year	Genre	Publisher	North America	Europe	Japan	Rest of World	Global

1

Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3

X360

2011

Shooter

Activision

8.73

4.12

0.13

1.28

14.25

4

Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3

PS3

2011

Shooter

Activision

5.38

5.52

0.49

1.49

12.88

25

Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3

PC

2011

Shooter

Activision

0.38

0.93

0.00

0.32

1.63

39

Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3

Wii

2011

Shooter

Activision

0.48

0.18

0.00

0.07

0.73

 (despite most marketshare)

29.49 million LTD an attach rate of about 11%

On a smaller market of 200, COD has less consumers to tailer for and can make the game itself better.

For a market of 200 million, all it would need was a 22% attach rate to meet the sales of a market 30% bigger than it.

Sorry but... what?!

So acordingto you, Call of Duty, a series that has peaked in terms of sales and popularity this gen (some may even call it the franchise of the gen in terms of sales and popularity) and has "only" been able to reach a 11% rate, and yet just because the market will be smaller it will be able to get twice the attach rate because ...?

Let me put it this way. If there are less consumers but the same number of games, what will happen is either that there will be more flops, or that the sales will split more evently across all the titles causing all of them to fail their sales targets. Unless you are suggesting that games will still sell the same amount?

Oh, and the number of games that reach an attach ratio close to 15% is really, really low. Thinking that just because there are less consoles the attach ratio will increase is simply short sighted. Take for example Mario Kart Wii: on a 101 million install base the game sold 32.54 or an attach rate of 34%, yet Mario Kart 64 sold 9.87 mil units on a 32.93 mil install base, so a 30% attach rate. And that is one of the biggest franchises of this industry.

As many here have already said, a bigger market give the games a better chance of selling.