I've often seen people talk on the forums about how Wii and DS are supposed to have better legs compared to XBox 360 and PS3 and from I've been seeing in the weekly sales charts it seemed to me that it was the case. But to make sure of it I tried a little experiment with this week's (ending Nov 24^th 2007) top 200 sales.

I concentrated on titles with what I would consider to be GREAT legs. So out of the 200 most purchased titles (49 on DS, 47 on Wii, 43 on XB360, 27 on PS3, 22 on PS2, 10 on PSP, 1 each for XB and GBA) I counted how many titles were out for 6 months or more (26 weeks and  up).

Here are the results :

DS:               19
XB360:         12 (10)
Wii:               9 (7)
PS3:             4 (3)
PSP:             4
PS2:             1
XB:               1

Number in parenthesis are without bundled games.

Now, these numbers aren’t what I would call very riveting if left alone like that, but if you factor in the total sales for the titles it gets a little more interesting (total sales and averages don’t include bundled games) :

DS :             573,541  (Avg. : 30,186)
XB360 :       140,754  (Avg. : 14,075)
Wii :            185,935  (Avg. : 26,562)
PS3:            48,376    (Avg. : 16,125)
PSP:            67,228    (Avg. :  16,807)
PS2:            10,799    (Avg. : 10,799)
XB:              14,391    (Avg. : 14,391)

So as you can see average sales for old titles on Sony and Microsoft systems are roughly the same (from 14k to 17k for active systems) but the DS and Wii’s  averages for old games are much higher (30k and 26k).

Hope you guys liked my experiment!

It's an insult to say titles like Brain Training, Nintendogs, NSMB, Pokemon have legs. They don't have legs, they have nuclear power plants that run indefinitely.

They exist in their own class and can't be compared to other games that have so called 'legs'.

Good experiment!

DS games have fuel that just powers them for ages. Good to see that Wii games have good legs (Carnival Games is a monster).

hmmm... am I the only one expecting some real legs?

 hmmmm... was I the only one expecting some lame legs jokes?  

oh snap! 

@Galaki : Well that was my first idea when I wrote the title but somehow I got sidetracked and ended up with a bunch of numbers instead. I think I have ADD.

Upon noticing the title, it was my intention to come into this thread and say "mine and big and hairy".

So yeah, there ya go. =P

Interesting, and this would be even more extreme if done for japan.

Pokemon has legs but if you go back in the chartz to the first pokemon game was realesed in Japan and sees how many week is passed before it's out of top 20. That must have been the first super legs game.

That was an interesting little analysis. It'd be quite interesting to extend that out a little, to see which consoles/handhelds still have games charting after one year, two years etc.

The Wii numbers are perhaps overinflated by Mario Party, which has performed exceptionally. Once that title is removed the legs on the other 26+ titles are relatively weak in comparison, which is an interesting result.