Something I have never quite understood about console sales

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Shadow1980 said:

Because there is not much variability in attach rates. If VGC's platform totals chart is any indication, every major sixth and seventh-gen console had a final attach rate between 9 to 12 games per system sold (including pack-in titles), with the PS2, PS3, Xbox, and 360 all exceeding 10 games per system. The PS4 & XBO will likely attain similar attach rates to their predecessors. This means that the total amount of software sold for a system is mostly dependent on how much hardware is sold.

It should be immediately obvious to everyone that install bases are important. If a system has poor hardware sales, it will have poor total software sales. Additionally, a smaller install base appears to put a cap on the number of successful blockbuster releases for the system. Even if it has quite a few multi-million selling titles, some of which become among the best-selling titles of their generation, a system with a low install base will likely have fewer total multi-million sellers than a system with a much larger install base. The Wii U managed a few titles with insane attach rates for just those games (over half of all Wii U owners have a copy of Mario Kart 8), but it had far fewer million-plus sellers than any other system released in the past three generations except for the Dreamcast.

And while exclusives may fare well on a system with a small install base (probably because many people who own those systems bought one just to play those exclusives), any multiplatform titles will likely fare worse on the system with a smaller install base. How many major current-gen multiplatform games, even ones where MS got Xbox-branded marketing exclusivity for, have fared better on the XBO than on the PS4? None that I can think of. Kind of expected when the PS4 has nearly double the install base of the XBO.

And this is why hardware sales are the best overall measure of a system's health.

It is actually the software sales that indicate if the system is healthy and hardware sales indicate there are desired games on the system. However, the more functions a device have, such as all the smart devices, including PC (Windows, Linux, Mac), you'll see the attach rate going down, because people buy these devices for other purposes. In the same sense, the variety of the software on the system indicates how big of an attach rate you can expect for your game: if you have all sorts of games on your system, the attach rate for a single game is going to be lower than on a system that has games only from a few categories - but only if your game fits these categories.

If you think of these worst selling Nintendo consoles, their problem have been good variation of different type of games, so that you didn't have a single category that you could have great sales despite low overall console sales. If you compare this to 7th generation, Wii had huge console sales with great variety of games, so the game sales for all categories were great, as opposed to PS360, that were both pidgeonholed to just a few genres, so the games didn't sell outside these categories, despite what the overall attach rate was.