the_dengle said:
Saying "there are too many variables so you can't prove me wrong" is just lazy. It's also a gross underestimation of my willingness to waste my time. There are certainly many variables affecting game sales: marketing, word of mouth, install base, market appeal, and more. We can control for those pretty easily! Let's look at the same game in the same market -- this eliminates almost all variables. If we look at the US alone, the install base of the PS4 and XBO are very close, and we can control for this even further. Obviously my contention is that the PS4 has had several more major releases this year than the XBO and therefore according to you (and others) it has a 'variable' which would bring sales of all of its games down by an indeterminate amount. My own theory is that this makes the PS4 a healthy platform and it will either have no measurable effect on game sales or it will in fact benefit them. We'll focus on the major multiplatform games released so far this year: Ghost Recon Wildlands, Resident Evil VII, For Honor, Mass Effect Andromeda, and Hitman, as well as a few smaller games, let's say Yooka-Laylee, Sniper Elite 4, and Telltale's The Walking Dead. Conventional wisdom would suggest that these smaller games would be more easily lost in the shuffle on PS4, so your unknown variable would benefit them on XBO. Immediately we can observe that the PS4 version of every one of the eight games I named has outsold its XBO counterpart every single week this year, with very few exceptions (a couple of later weeks of For Honor, a few essential ties in the triple-digit range for the smaller games). From this we can conclude that your mystery variable is at least too weak to overcome the 10% install base difference. But we can bypass the install base entirely by looking at tie ratio. The percentage of total platform userbase who bought each game in the US -- REVII PS4: 2.57% Wildlands PS4: 2.57% For Honor PS4: 2.09% Andromeda PS4: 1.90% Hitman PS4: 0.62% Trust me that the other three continue this trend. An easier way to illustrate this would be to simply point out that despite only a 10% difference in install base, the PS4 has sold more than 15% more software than the XBO this year. The release of major exclusives like MLB The Show, Persona 5, Horizon, Kingdom Hearts, Nioh, and Nier Automata had no observable impact on sales of other software. If I was to conclude a trend from the figures I've measured, I'd decide that the frequent pace of releases has cultivated a healthy platform that is more beneficial to smaller releases. I'm sure that if Nintendo flooded the Switch with major first-party exclusives week after week they would eventually hit some kind of breaking point, causing their games to start stepping on each others' sales, especially since supply constraints are a factor. But I'm not convinced that Zelda would have suffered if Mario Kart had released a few weeks earlier. |
It would be lazy if that's the argument i made, but it isn't :p Believing "[x] > [y] doesn't make [y] irrelevant" is not the same as saying "[xyzabcde] exist so you can't prove [y] doesn't".
Before we go any further i just need to ask: What exactly are you arguing against here? You spend several paragraphs presenting an argument against a version of my points I've not made, then ultimately agree with my actual point. We clearly disagree on how relevant a variable it is, but that's never been my point of dispute. I just disagree with dismissing it entirely, and mocking others on that basis. If i'd argued that library size has an absolute value independent of other factors, then you'd be making a compelling case against that, but I've not. It's fine if we disagree where the breaking point is, as long as we agree there is one. After all, this discussion is effectively just a macro equivalent of "Can someone be interested in more games than they can justify buying at any given time?"
