What about what is happening with the Vita, the slow SW launch window. Do you think Sony is giving more strength to the PS3 SW offerings so as to keep the PS3 strong, at the expense of the Vita?

Also, why was Sony able to support the PS2 in its twilight at PS3 launch, and Nintendo was not able to do the same with the Wii, despite having a weak 3DS launch? Will there be some kind of surprise to show where all the work has gone in the mean time?

I have no idea why Nintendo has all but abandoned the Wii.  They're by far the biggest dedicated gaming company in the world, so to say they can only focus their resources on one console at a time is ludicrous.  But I think the reason Sony was able to keep the PS2 going for so long was that it already had a ton of 3rd party support, not to mention being the best selling console of all time, so both of those thing helped to give the system a long life cycle.  3rd party support was never big with the Wii, but it didn't need to be since it's Nintendo's stuff that everyone from the longtime fan or the casual gamer buys for it, so no software for Ninty, no more Wii.

As for the Vita, I think the main problem isn't so much on the software side... it had some great launch games and plenty of SW on the horizon, with more to be revealed at E3 for sure.  I think its biggest problem (in my humble opinion) is the same problem that the PSP had... it's a handheld that tries too hard to be like its console big brother.  The perception of the PSP by a lot of people, especially here in the west, was that of "Why should I spend over $200 on a handheld version of a console I already own with essentially the same library of games, only with gimped controls and visuals?"  The Vita seems to have followed this same path, essentially being a portable PS3 which, while technically impressive no doubt, doesn't do enough to justify its own existence.  Having handheld versions of Uncharted and God of War is great, but if you already have a PS3, wouldn't you just rather get those games on the PS3 instead?

Basically, the Vita just doesn't do enough to differentiate itself from its console brethren.  The GB and DS systems were all unique experiences with their own unique library of games, not to mention being much more affordable and catering to the biggest audience for handheld gaming... kids and young teens.

There is a moderately strong positive linear correlation between consoles sold and games produced to the amount of software sold on it (when compared to individual consoles, ex. Wii HW vs Wii SW, otherwise it's a different story), so yes they are proportional. However, to answer the question in the title, they are not directly proportional as the correlation coeffcient is less than 1.

Even if the two were directly proportional, correlation does not imply causation, and you couldn't say one caused the other no matter how perfectly proportional they are. Taking off my statistician hat for a second, I think it's attach rates for certain generas that causes the correlation between the two. Game developers know they can churn out a sub-par shooter on the HD consoles and make a profit with it, so that's exactly what they do (this can explain the much larger proportional units of software produced for the HD twins vs. the Wii.)

I feel so important. Thanks happydolphin

For one, Sony is just plain bad at planning things out. They are quite horrid a it. 

The Vita had a week launch, I feel, because Sony had way too much faith in it to do really well. It had a pretty good opening but then shot down because... well the Japanese aren't a stupid people. The Vita had no games. There was nothing going for it. I feel Sony really just did not know where they were going. Obviously they haven't been doing a single thing with the PS3, they have one new 1st party game. Wow.

Same with Nintendo, they had too much faith in it at the start. (The 3DS.) But they fixed it.

@wh1pL4shL1ve_007. My pleasure.

I see what you're saying about casuality, even if they were directly proportional (hypothetical), you wouldn't be able to tell which caused which (HW sales causes more SW releases, or SW releases causes more HW sales).

One thing I wanted to ask you.

What if we had the following instead for the SW releases trend:

A column chart with 6 values for each year: the number of:

1) AAA Nintendo games: 3D Mario, 3D Zelda

2) Big Nintendo hits: Mario Kart Wii, Wii Sports, Wii Play

3) Moderately successful Casual games (Nintendo and 3rd party): Trauma team, cooking mama

4) AAA 3rd party games: MH Tri, Silent Hill: Shattered Memories.

5) B 3rd party games: The Conduit, Madworld

6) Shovelware: Babyz, horsez, etc.

Would that give us more data to work with? Would the ratio of Nintendo Big Hits to shovelware be an important factor in the analysis? What if Nintendo released the M+ in a time where the number of yearly games (total and shovelware for that matter) was dwindling? Would the shovelware from previous years affect the result, still causing saturation and buyer confusion?

I was answering his question about Sony focusing more on the PS3 than the Vita.

Not only we couldn't tell which caused which, but we wouldn't be able to tell if they even caused each other. I remember hearing about a study that showed there was a strong positive linear correlation between ice-cream sales and number of deaths by drowning. You couldn't say "oh, ice-cream caused the drownings because they ate it then went swimming" or "the drownings caused the ice-cream sales, they bought it to console themselves after they drowned (horrible example :P)". In reality the most likely thing is more people swam in the season when more people bought ice-cream: the summer.

As for the chart, I believe all we would get is a very skewed chart (Nintendo simply can't make enough AAA games to balance out the shovelware). Perhaps if we had a chart that shows the proportions of games sold in each category, it would be much more manageable, but I can't seem to find any relevance to this particular study.

In my opinion, the best way to express the data would be a least-squares linear regression line, with ŷ representing the predicted SW sales for a given year (n) and x representing hardware sales of year n-1. Having two charts with different intervals on the axes makes it much more difficult to accurately see the correlation between the two.