I stand corrected, the statitics page here at VGC said 0.0 but not n/a which is what I would expect to see for not released.

I apologize for the error.

They do Christmas in Japan. It's not religious over there, but they rock the Santa and gifts. It's not as big as western Christmas, but it's still pretty big, and then goes right into New Year's, where they really blow all their money.



Great analysis Grampy. I never really believed in "system sellers" either. They exist, but not like the hype machines would have us believe. Nice to see it organized like this.

I actually think that better indicator (than just watching ups and downs before and after a games release), would be to take into account the legs that the specific game has and how do the hardware sales relate to specific software sales curve.

Anyways, good job old-timer.

It's simpler than everyone makes it out to be. Here let me explain. When a huge game is about to release... what does that huge game get? Large advertising and marketing. When this happens the platforms are required to be shown and even more so when exclusive. Basically when a huge game releases you get double the advertising which gets more people aware of the brand.

The other easy concept is you have more people in the stores buying the game haha. The more people there the better chance they have of buying the console then if they aren't there. And then of course people specifically buying a console for a game... however this is a much smaller percentage aside from Japan. Otherwise it's really just as simple as getting more advertising for the console and more people in the stores.

@Zucas: That's why you need to look how hardware sales relate to software sales.
If the game ups hardware sales and the (HW) sales stay at high level, after the software has gone down, the specific software isn't selling games anymore.

Look at the Halo spike last year, there was Bioshock, Halo and a pricecut that affected the spike back then.

You do realize the only one that has any significant ramp up is right before Christmas...

SW has very little impact short term... 20k extra in one week just isn't significant in statistical or in the real world.

@steven: Unless we are talking about constant rate of games that boost the 20k each week.

But we're not, because they don't.  4 weeks of 20k, 15k, 10k, 5k, and then back to normal is not significant.

50k consoles is not a significant amount of consoles.

Nintendo shipping more consoles the week of or after a big release is not a good way to look at "system sellers"... Wii is a supply driven console.

@steven: Constant rate of 20k per week would mean 1M per year.
My point of view was, that if console X is able to get enough "system sellers" its constant demand goes up. If we go by your 20k, 15k, 10k, 5k example, and look at four "system selling" games getting released, each with its own week in a row:
1st week, 20k
2nd week, 35k
3rd week, 45k
4th week, 50k
5th week 30k
6th week 15k
7th week 5k

So those four games would have sold 200k systems in four weeks, 2,6 M additional consoles a year if this would be a constant rate.

As for the Wii, it's supply driven only in US.

But then we're not talking individual games, we're talking library. 50k is setting the bar pretty low, there are a lot of reasons why numbers could jump that much. Price drops, supply increases,

4 major hits or "system sellers" in a row doesn't happen. (Except maybe pre-holiday releases, which would be an increase that wouldn't be fair to measure) So again I must say, this is not what we're talking about, because it's doesn't happen.

There's so few games that impact weekly sales, even slightly, that it's not really measurable. If there were more we still couldn't measure because of the limited number of weeks distorting data.

The definition of "System Seller" isn't 100k consoles.

It's gotta be significant, significance is outside the margin of error. Because weekly sales are too unstable, you would need to look at quarter or annual sales. But then that is not very reliable either.

It's a game that has so much power that it gets a significant number of people to buy a console, by itself. Not necessarily in a certain time frame.

Edit:

For the record, I do think system sellers exist, I just think that it has been proven in this thread.