I'm not trying to derail this thread or anything but aren't those MS numbers heavily inflated by the multiple Halo releases? It almost seemed like they tried to make it seem like MS has different crazy selling games across the board compared to Sony or some sh!t lol

but whatever with that though..

cheers to MS i guess

:)

You need to change this to Microsoft is a better publisher this generation as your source is only pertaining to this. Very interesting though!

Why are you ignoring PS1 and PS2 published games? If you're only taking about this gen, then state that in the title.

You can argue about quality of titles when Sony wins even as a MS fan we know this, or at least acknowledge the possibility of it.

Sales wise MS has won hands down.

It's a fair question. Let's compute the difference:

Here are the total Halo games on 360:

Halo alone:

1 10M+

4 5M+

6 1M+

37.35M total sales (Million sellers)

MS without Halo:

1 10M+

4 5M+

15 1M+

91.65M total sales (Million sellers)

Sony:

0 10M+

4 5M+

24 1M+.

83M total sales (Million sellers)

MS having a skewed number of 360's sold in NA compared to WW has proven to be an advantage in terms of selling software. They can afford to create and effectively market a game for a single market.

Over half the 360's in the world are in NA (about 56% last time I checked). So MS create and market games for their biggest audience. Roughly 60% of Gears games sell in NA, 66% of Halo, nearly 70% of Fable. The vast bulk of their biggest game series sales coming from one market.

Besides GT in Europe, Sony's titles generally have more of a worldwide split.  With only 25m hardware units in NA, some series that could be bigger, ala GOW or Uncharted are not able to because of the lower install base and NA is the region these titles would sell best. While Sony's lead in EU has lead to GT selling the most units ever there and about 65% of Fifa games selling on the PS3, the core games Sony are offering just don't sell as well in the region. Out of the 28 Sony games in the OP, 22 of those games sold more copies in NA.

So while I think MS are a more successful publisher, a lot of it is down to install base, and what market/distribution that install base has. The nearly 9 million consoles Sony has in Japan really does nothing for most of their exclusives, unless they're japanese centric, but Sony has had it's eyes set on the west this entire generation.

for sony: demon's souls

for MS: borderlands, mass effect 2, dance central

...only publisher in japan.

inflats sony's numbers by 1.33M.  inflats MS's numbers by 8.87M. 

but even correcting the numbers in the OP for sales that were not published by MSony the overall point still stands.

I agree that MS has published higher selling "Blockbuster" titles than Sony in the 7th gen. From a gamers standpoint though, I just hope that doesn't deter any gaming company from producing games that are different, creative, and innovation driven. Halo, COD, and Gears are fun games for sure, but I also really liked Alan Wake, Heavy Rain, Demon's Souls, the Fallouts, and story driven RPG's like the Final Fantasy series (except for 13, I think that one sucks compared to 12 & 10 and all the others).

From a business standpoint I can totally see why any company would make COD's and Halo's, it's big time money for them, I just hope we always have other types of games that sell well so publisher's will be more inclined to invest time and money in making them. And I hope not all games become so similar to COD the way Resident Evil 6 did. I like real Survival Horror games that are truly frightening like Resident Evil 1 and the original Silent Hill.


I'm really looking forward to The Last Of Us, Beyond 2 Souls, and the next God Of War game.

Didn't know xbox exclusives outsold PS3's! cool stuff

But I don't think you can take the past and predict the future that way. Because, then PS3 would have had much bigger successes than it currently has (not saying it's bad though) and Wii U would win this gen.

Nowadays I don't think exclusives matters as much as most games are multiplats

You have to acknowledge that there is a lot of subtlety under the surface of how these systems are designed from the operating system to the development tools and the technology used to build them. The Xbox 360 for instance is generally about half a frame ahead of the PS3 in latency (due to Blu Tooth vs RF)  so when you take extra online latency into account the impression that Xbox Live is 'better' for many people could partially be founded on the lower latency of Xbox 360 games. If one system is 180ms and the other system is say 220ms taking into account network lag and you're waiting one more frame to update the picture then the former will 'feel' better than the latter even if you can't put it into words.

Another thing is gameplay by numbers. Games which have low controller latency (framerate + game code) tend to sell better than games which are much slower. So whilst you can have game critics engaging their front brains and telling us that game X is better than game Y because it is innovative you have a much wider audience using their limbic system saying that one game 'feels better' than another. So you can have two different answers depending on what part of the brain gets asked. Microsoft gets the basic psychology better than Sony so they can better hook into peoples addiction centers with things like achievements and avatars etc.