Exactly why the 360 is beasting, excelent Apps and excelent games.

:P

No, peripherals sell consoles. 

Why did Nintendo sell the Wii Fit board with the game? A Wii Remote with a game?  Because people wanted the hardware.

Why was the Xbox 360 so successful?  The Xbox 360 controller, Kinect, and add-on HDDs and Wi-Fi adapters.

Why did it take the PS3 so long to sell well?  The Sixaxis controller.  Once the DualShock 3 was released and the console dropped by $100, it sold like hot cakes.

So people are entertained by peripherals?

They are entertained by what they can DO with those peripherals. Wii Sports. Kinect Adventures. Wii Fit. Critical mass of PS3 exclusives and good enough cross-platform support.

360 is successful because of Halo, CoD and an online service that supports that multiplayer. It could be an small green cube with a PS2 controller and it would sell.

If the Balance Board was released with a test app and then 6 months later Wii Fit launched, when would people buy it? The months later.

Actually price cut sells consoles. Look at 3DS. After the price cut it started selling although there were no notable games. PS3 started selling after dropping to $299.

> Console has X
> Console sold well

Does NOT mean X caused it to sell well.

This thread makes me lose faith in VGC. The first post doesn't even believe games sell consoles, he thinks Netflix and "versatility" do.

Wii Sports and Wii Fit you could immediately identify as awesome from the commercial. NintendoLand is something you really need to play on a Wii U to see.

Granted part of that would be if nintendo simply made good commercials like the Wii would like to play ones. Maybe a rehash with "Wii would like to play with U" actually showing the person with tablet sitting off in a distinctly different area than the other 4 players.

It is the price that sells systems. You shouldn't make a really quality ( but expensive) device in a market like this. Just make something crappy and add a gimmick.

My post was sarcasm.

If one wants to be analytical, there are several factors to the success of a console.  People buy the hardware based on features and capabilities, and the promise of the launch games and future titles.  They keep playing because of the design/engineering of the device, the quality of the gaming experience, the entertainment value of the system and its games, and any added value they obtain via the online capabilities, peripherals, and applications of use beyond gaming.

People buy a game console to play games.  So it's rather obvious that someone is going to buy a console to play games, therefore it's logical that games establish success for a console. 

The Earth is round.  That's not an amazing fact.  It's just a fact.  People buy game consoles to play games, therefore the more games sold for a console the more successful that console.

If every PSV buyer was buying every game available for the PSV than it would be a successful gaming system regardless of whether or not it sold 100,000 or 100,000,000.  If a developer can assume 100K in sales, or 100M in sales, they're going to make a game for it.  Unfortunately, since gamers are fickle PSV owners don't buy every game available.  The problem with the PSV beyond gaming is what's the value?  Everything you can do on the PSV you can do on a smartphone. 

So PSV owners have to carry a smartphone AND a PSV if they want to be in contact with people and do some mobile gaming.  Tell me, what killer app is going to fix that?  What game will be so worth owning that gamers would gladly carry two devices rather than just one?

Had Sony combined the functionality of the Xperia Play and the PS Vita in one device they would have built the killer app.  Instead they built the Xperia Play which they quietly forgot and then the PS Vita which so far developers have loudly forgotten.

Bottomline, you can't pin it all on games.  There has to be a perceived value to a gaming system that has to be overcome before gamers will consider it.  The question of "Is this worth it?" has to be answered confidently by the purchaser, if not there won't be a purchase.

Elephants don't bite.  I doubt you've ever been bitten by an elephant, right?  However, you've probably been bitten a few times by a mosquito or midge.  It isn't the big things in life that bite you, it's the small things.  It's not one big thing that matters for a console, it's a lot of little things.

Games sell consoles? Yep. However the best games for this are the ones which sell *craploads* because you're moving beyond the people who buy 10 games a year to the portion of the population that may end the generation with a handful. Hardcore gamers are the reason why games which sell say 500,000 copies sell 500,000 copies but the casual market is the reason why consoles exist and why games like Call Of Duty sell what they do.

To have a viable console you need to have both groups because without casuals the games won't have the potential to sell millions of copies and without the hardcore the games fall off a cliff in terms of sales if they don't appeal to the casual market.

soleron i wanted to respond earlier, and i wanted to say that games ARE apps.

They both sell consoles in tandem, and apps are just as important. lets be frank. wiifit is not a game. It's an app disguised as a game. Or look at ds. Did you know one of the main selling poins in japan was because people were using it as english japanese trandlators?  Translators run nearly 1000 a piece and the ds style suitably filled that role for a tenth.

I know you'll disagtee about games being apps, but that's why they call games "killer apps". It's just an application of the system.

Tpday's verbiage has kinda changed the meaning of app into "a functional sofyware" like a map or an egg timer. This is not the case.