| Shadow1980 said: No chance in hell Halo 5 is going to turn things around for the XBO. Rare is the individual game that actually makes such a huge impact on a system's fortunes. You can count on one hand the amount of games that made that big of a difference. I can maybe think of only four games made in the past 30 years: Super Mario Bros. (arguably helped get the NES in homes), Sonic the Hedgehog (the first truly big killer app for the Genesis; likely helped boost sales once Nintendo lost their monopoly), Final Fantasy VII (marked the point where the PS1 finally started outselling the N64 in the U.S.), and Halo CE (was to the Xbox like what SMB was to the NES; based on NPD data, by the end of Q1 2002 Halo had an attach rate of over 50% in the U.S.). Nothing else could be argued to be that significant, that big of a killer app than those four games. Nothing else comes close. And three of those were games that helped put a console brand on the map, while only one of them, FFVII, actually caused a system with less-than-great sales to actually start selling well (the PS1 was literally selling at GameCube levels in the U.S. before September '97; it sold just shy of 2 million units in all of 1996 according to NPD). Nearly all other system-sellers have provided a boost that lasted only a month at best (the combination of MKWii and Brawl appears to have given the Wii a decent boost to sales for several months, but not any longer, and the system was already huge beforehand). I mean, let's look at monthly sales of the 360 in the U.S. since it launched:
Halo 3 did provide an unambiguous boost to sales, more than any other game released outside the holidays. Yet both it and a price cut boosted it to only 528k. The combination of Black Ops and Kinect gave a YoY boost for November '10 that may have been beyond the boost provided by the 360S, Gears 3 may have been what caused average weekly sales for September '11 to be higher than the previous month, and Skyrim & MW3 also may be responsible for the YoY boost for November '11. Other than that, there were no clearly major system-sellers for the 360 in the U.S., not even the other Halo games (most people interested in Halo probably already had a 360 by time Reach came out). The biggest boosters for 360 sales were price cuts and the release of the 360S, not individual games. Halo 5 could boost XBO sales above those of the PS4 in October (depends on when the PS4 gets a price cut and how big it is), but it's not going to do much of anything beyond that. It is not going to be a game-changer like FFVII was for the PS1. End of story. |
I don't know if I've said this before, but you always have some of the best posts on this site. Always a pleasure to read.
