The 360 had probably one of the most diverse and interesting exclusive line-ups between 2006 and early 2009, but then it all just came to a complete halt. Over the last three years the PS3 has had a much more diverse line-up than the 360, which means it had a lot more games releasing within the year, which then means more competition among games on the PS3 platform for the PS3 user-base. So basically, the 360 was once an extremely diverse and interesting console, it is now not, while the PS3 has rapidly become more diverse and has received many more releases within the year.

As of right now, the PS3 is the more diverse console, not because of all of it's major releases, but because of the large amount of it's smaller releases like Yakuza, No More Heroes HD, Ar Tonelico, Alchemist of Arland, Hyper Dimension Neptunia, MLB: The Show, SOCOM 4, Motostorm: Whatever and the HD collections. The larger releases help as well.

There are a few first person action games, but the vast majority of them are third person. Some FPS like halo are played in third person for a large portion of the game so I guess they aren't exclusively first person. Saying a fps is just being in first person mode while shooting is like saying an action game is just killing all the enemies on the screen mostly in third person mode. Both genres have a lot more to them.

Games like borderlands are heavily focused on collecting loot and leveling up. Games like Bioshock are heavily focused on exploring and using plasmids(basically magic) which I probably used more than guns in my playthrough. Around half of halo's campaign is played in third person. In portal you don't even shoot at anyone, you just solve puzzles in fp mode with a gun. Left 4 Dead isn't about defeating your enemy, its about trying to escape them and get to saftey, and melee weapons are a very important part of the game.  While you can basically sum up most of the gameplay in fps games as shooting in first person, there is actually a lot of variaty in that than most people would think.

Also I'm am sincerely sorry if it seems like I took your percentages. It just took me a while to make the charts so I didn't see your post when I clicked submit, if I had seen it I would have just used your percents and given you credit. I'm glad both our percentages are very close to each other though because I did some rounding and didn't double check but comparing numbers to yours it seems they are very accurate.

Also @ enditall727, the numbers are the number of games sold from each genre, divided by the total number of games sold for each console. So for example the light green for the 360 chart tells you what percent of all software sold for the 360 is action games.

I realized you didn't take my percentages, yours were a little different. Also you posted around ten minutes after I did, and your length of post was too big to be written in such a short amount of time. You also have simulation genre on the pie chart which I skipped because it didn't seem that important.

Halo is only played in tps mode when driving a vehicle right? Or when using a heavy gun? Cause I remember playing most of halo 3 in first person. Portal should be in puzzle genre from what I have heard of it.

According to the info we have gathered both the systems favour fps, shooter, and action. For a system to be completely 100% diverse it needs to be equally distributed across the genres, i.e. 9.09% (or in your case a little less). If you do the average of the deviation from that percentage you will realize that PS3 actually deviates less. Action games being 24% is a good thing because it also consists of some shooters like uncharted so if you change uncharted to tps (which you can, thereby proving my point that action games are indeed more diverse than fps since an fps game is an action game but the opposite is not true), than the percentage for shooters on the PS3 rises.

Also according to VGchartz CoD + Halo on the 360 itself equals into 71.3 million, around 57 % of the fps sales on the 360 and around 90 % of the total fps sales on the PS3. When 57% of the fps sales are from just 2 franchises, you know that there isn't much diversity inside the genre and even if it is there its not selling. Ironically both halo and call of duty are known for their multi-player.

[ On Ps3, call of duty franchise has sold 40% of the fps sales. The racer genre in which we have seen 2 GTs is only a little ahead of the 360 in terms of popularity and in terms of sales its behind it. ]

On PS3 the same cannot be said for the action genre, where the only game that has sold a ton is GTA ( 8+ million ). Other games like god of war, Uncharted, infamous, red dead redemption, assassin's creed 2 etc sum up the audience on the PS3.

This is just going to lead to silly arguments so I'll be careful not to say anything offensive.

In terms of the number of games, 360's library is just as diverse as PS3's, I would even argue more. In terms of best selling games PS3 fans see more diversification among third party platforms because PS3's popularity is more evenly spread then 360's. 360 is most popular in Americas, and in that region shooters sell. PS3 is popular in Japan though, that's why FFXII has 4.5 million sales on PS3 and only 2. something on 360. They both sold equally well outside Japan, but Japanese gamers love JRPG's.

If you take the top 20 exclusives-

360 has: 8 Shooters, 3 Racing, 3 RPG, 2 Action/Adventure, 1 Party, 1 Sports, 1 Dance, 1 Strategy
PS3 has: 8 Shooters, 3 Racing, 3 Platformer, 5 Action/Adventure, 1 Sports

Shooters just don't sell as well on PS3 as they do on 360 because 360 is nearly twice as popular in Americas then PS3. However the overall library is just as diverse, we just see a concentration of sales focused on shooters, racing games and RPG's on 360 (not just shooters). PS3's library sees a concentration of shooters, Platformer, and Action/Adventure titles. However there are less genres in the top 20 PS3 games. So in this regard, 360 has more diversity in exclusives.

So this whole argument of PS3 being more diverse is nonsense. It's just a matter of preference. Some people like Action/Adventure titles, some people like RPG's. Some people like semi-fantasy realistic shooters (MGS, Uncharted), while others like full out science fiction (Halo, Gears). Some people like Kinect, others like LittleBigPlanet. To each their own, anyone spewing out that PS3 is more diverse is just an arrogant brat, who likely never gave the 360 a chance. Same goes the opposite way, but on this website you probably won't hear much of that.

ME3 isn't getting too many PS3 pre-orders because there is no hype for the franchise as a PS3 franchise. PS3 owners still see this as a 360 favoring game since there is no ME1 on PS3, and have no interest to try the game despite its level of quality. It's sad that they just won't try out ME2, but it's the way it is. I'm sure Dark Souls won't do too well on 360 for the same reasons (and because no Japanese market on 360).

I would consider MGS, Uncharted, and Resident Evil shooters, but Alan Wake is an action game just like Heavy Rain. Amazing pie graph, solves this debate.

Thats exactly the thing. Just like uncharted 2 is an action game that is also a tps. FPS games have subgenres too. Portal is a an fps because you play it in first person and it involves shooting a gun. But you use it exclusively to solve puzzles. Borderlands is a first person shooter that has more rpg elements than games that some people think of exclusively as rpgs such as fable. Bioshock and Metro 2033 could be considered adventure games, and have amazing stories. I don't know about your gameplay experience, but other than the flood levels in halo 3's campaign I was mostly on a vehicle, and even more so on halo reach.

As for the fps genre in general. Just call of duty accounts for 40% of ps3 fps sales like you said, but it accounts for 34% of 360 fps. Its not really fair to compare 2 fps franchises on the 360 with 1 on the ps3. So for the fps genre it could be said that 360 owners show more variety. But even if call of duty and halo were wiped from the equation, the 360 would have sold around 57million fps games, and eb the third strongest genre so other fps do sell well on the 360 as well. 

As for your other comparision, its hard to compare sales directly, because the 360 sells more games per console than the ps3 so smaller percents could still mean more games per console. Red Dead Redemption sold to 7.9% of all 360 owners, and sold to 7.6% of all ps3 owners. So even though RDR would be a bigger percentage of all ps3 software than all 360 software, a larger percentage of 360 owners actually have the game. The reason halo and call of duty seem to be the only thing that sells is because the 360 has a higher attach ratio than the ps3. 9.03 vs 7.85.

 Not sure if the above explanation makes too much sense, but basically even if you completely remove halo and call of duty from the 360's library, and only remove call of duty from the ps3's library. the 360 will still have a higher attach ratio. 7.69 vs 7.25. And thats removing the 360's two biggest franchises while only removing the biggest ps3 franchise. So while halo and call of duty make the average xbox owner seem to only be buying fps, even without them in the equation, the average xbox gamer buys more games than the average ps3 gamer so the idea that 360 owners only buy call of duty and halo is false. They basically buy a little bit more of everything else and than a lot more halo and call of duty.

One last thing I would like to point out. Even if someone was to somehow destroy every single fps game ever made, the 360 would still have a higher attach ratio than the ps3. 6.78 vs 6.37. So basically the average 360 owner owns more games of every genre combined other than fps than the average ps3 owner.

I think its fair to compare two franchises because they are both of the same genre. What can we do to try to evaluate diversity? When a particular fanbase is supposed to be diverse they can't buy something more than the average because than they wouldn't be diverse.

About portal, like I said, out of all the fpses Halo and call of duty sell the most in fact they are the majority. Attach rates don't really matter because attach rates will always be higher in America. There isn't much relation to diverse audience with attach rate.

To give you an example lets see the action genre on the PS3 vs fps genre on the 360 :

Out of the top 20 action games that have sold on the PS3, there are 16 different IPs. Out of these, there are 6 open world/sandbox games, 4 stealth action games(assassin's creed and Mgs 4), 3 third person shooters including Uncharted, 5 hack and slash and the remaining are batman and lego.

Out of the top 20 fps games on the 360 you have 10 different IPs. Out of these there are 6 call of duties, 3 halos, 2 left 4 deads, 1 battlefield bad company 2,  2 RSVegas, 2 bioshocks, 1 medal of honor, 1 borderlands, 1 GRAW, and the orange box. So a total of 11 military based shooters (Bad company, rainbow six, graw, call of duty, medal of honor).

Over 50 % of the fps games in the top 20 are millitary based shooters and even if we remove call of duty, there is still GRAW which is different but still military based and vegas and medal of honor and battlefield. If we include halo in it then that's 14. But I am not sure if people agree with halo being a military shooter even though technically its a military what I played in halo 3.

At the end of the day fps games don't have as much variety as action games. Uncharted is a lot different from assassin's creed and there's not that much difference between halo and call of duty. Uncharted and god of war 3 are different, god of war and assassin's creed are different, GTA and god of war is almost a genre apart and they are called as action games.

Well, one proof that comes to my mind is that Fighting games like Tekken and Street Fighter sell beter on PS3 despite the smaller userbase. So the market for beat'em ups is definitely larger on PS3.

Perhaps, but look at the top selling exclusives...Almost all shooting games, Racers, and Western RPG's. When you go further down the list the variety expands, but the top sellers are all in those genres (aside from one Kinect game which counts as much as Wii Sports, since it comes packaged with the hardware).  when you look at top selling PS3 exclusives, there are no real standout performances.  The highest selling Shooter is I think Resistance: Fall of Man, and while the Action/Adventure genre is in some ways similar in volume to Shooters on the 360, but I don't see MEtal Gear Solid, God of War, or Uncharted as being particularly similar to one another.  I would honestly break them up into different cagegories, adventure, action, and...something else.  Games like Metal Gear Solid are a combination of Shooter, Platformer, Action, and RPG, Ratchet and Clank has elements of platformers, shooters, adventures, puzzles, and strategy, and the later games had flying shoot-em-up action.  

It's really hard to nail, but I really do think that Xbox players have more concentrated tastes when it comes to gaming.  Hell, EVERY game that involves shooting sells better on the Xbox (including Grand Theft auto, the Call of Duty series, every first person shooter that's multiplatform).  

But a lot of that comes simply from the fact that the PS3 sells much better in Japan (hence the relative love for fighting games and JRPG's), but on the flipside, the Xbox sells better in the US, which loooves shooters and western-styled RPG's, naturally.