UK Charts Week Ending December 5 2015

[binary solo]

tak13 said:

binary solo said:

Did Mario Kart 8 open higher than MK Wii? If so that IS impressive.

 Ah, I thought that you were refering to the attach rate...
Oh people misunderstanding this!:P Nintendo has other consoles with higher sales than wii u hence wii binary! :P Also, I was meaning that wii u instalbase didn't stopped Mario kart 8 to push very high sales  relative to size of installbase! :P Attach rate is important. it's not just a number which fluctuates depending on the size of installbase! It expresses how many people of a console installbase are buying the game, as the installbase widens may the attach rate fall but it can increase accordingly! :P You can sell 5m in a 10m installbase and 3m 20m! ;P

Not sure why you'd be thinking attach rate when the XCX comparison to XC was purely on absolute sales numbers, not attach rate.

Attach rate has to be used very carefully because it can mislead, both in a good and bad way. There are some games that are more or less immune to install base and other games will sell better as install base rises. Halo is an example of a franchise that is relartively unaffected by install base. This is because it has a large core fanbase and that fanbase is committed to Xbox and Halo.  Halo 5 might have caused the commitment of some to waver, but with free extras being added over time (like Forge is coming / here, and they might retrofit split screen if they know what's good for them) sales might remain strong and steady over the long term and Halo 5 might sell like Halo should. MK and NSMB seem to grow with install base, albeit growth isn't linear. Attach rate for games like that is always high regardless of install base. Even though MK Wii doesn't have an attach rate like MK8, the fact it managed a 35% attach rate on a 100 million selling console is a much more impressive achievement than 50% attach rate on Wii U.

There is every possibility that XCX will actually sell more in absolute terms than XC. Whereas there is zero chance that MK8 will sell more in absolute numbers than MK Wii. If XCX outsells XC then that is a mighty achievement for that game relative to it's predecessor. Even if both have rather low sales on the Nitnendo best seller list.