Perhaps instead of blaming the system for poor sales of a game, you should take a step back and look at the big picture. What is the game's target demographic? How saturated is the market with games for that demographic? What features make the game stand out from others like it? Are those features really valued by the customer? Did the game receive a heavy advertising budget? Will word of mouth eventually boost the product's sales higher?

There are many questions you should ask when a game fails. The one thing you should never do is blame the system itself for a game's failure to sell. A game system is merely a tool to play games on; it has no say in how well or how poorly a game does. Those who buy the system decide what they want for it, not the system itself.

this is what i beleive, and truly think as psp gets ground it will be the same, i went to a restaurant the other day and saw a family of young children 4 with nds, and they were not exactly playing hardcore but kept switching cartridges with easch other every 5 minutes. real gamers need real quality games

Before we go any further into your argument, because you're really just stating what almost everyone already knows, let's look at the two games in question.

Inazuma Eleven: Soccer RPG

Sigma Harmonics: Developed by the team that brought Final Fantasy VII: Dirge of Cerebus

I'm not sure what kind of market there is for a Soccer RPG. Honestly, I don't think anyone does. It just seems like two things that shouldn't be put together, really.

Then there's Sigma Harmonics. It's an RPG by Square Enix released in the wake of Dragon Warrior V. If nothing else, it seems like it's the victim of the publisher's own success here. We can play the FFVII: DoC card, too, but that's kind of understood.

Moreover, let's not beat around the bush here. The DS has an incredibly high piracy rate in Asian countries. The Wii, well, it's harder to pirate on.

But you're right about the install base not equaling automatic sales. But I think it's more than that, really. There's tons of deserving games that just don't catch fire the way they likely should. Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time, Beyond Good & Evil, Okami, No More Heroes, Soul Bubbles... there's tons of games that should sell but don't. There's always some intangible element.

Then there are games that shouldn't sell well but do. It happens all the time and all you have to do is peer through the Playstation's Greatest Hits releases, Nintendo's Player's Choice titles or Xbox's Platinum Hits. You'll see tons of undeserving games that sold like or better than gangbusters.

That's kind of the law of averages, though, isn't it? Perhaps there's a bell curve going on. Something's in the air. Whatever it is, having a great game just isn't enough. Word-of-mouth could do well for both games, yet. Perhaps there'll be a lull where people are bored before, say, Valkyrie Profile DS comes out. And, boom, they pick up Sigma Harmonics to kill that time.

I get the point you were trying to make. It's just a rather lame way of going about it.

For developers and publishers, it makes sense to go to the highest install base with the lower development costs. Right now, that'd be the Wii and DS. Conversely, though, there's a market to be had for those people who don't, for whatever reason, already own a Wii or DS. That market, if you're a multiplatform console developer, just happens to be slightly bigger than the Wii's install base. As for the PSP, the releases are so few and far between, it seems, that it'd be easy to be the best game out in any given month. So, yeah, you'll likely get good press and good word-of-mouth between PSP owners.

I have to counter one point above: no game ever sells well that "shouldn't", nor does any game fail to sell well that "should", in reality. Perhaps by personal standards these are true, but by market standards, what sells well is what does its job well. What sells poorly does not do its job well.

A lot of people misunderstand what "doing its job well" entails. Many believe that it's limited to gameplay alone, or graphics alone, or some combination of them. But it's not. Gameplay, graphics, sound, story, presentation, special effects, all of these are merely means to an end. A game that does its job well does not need any of these things in great quantities; it simply needs enough of them arranged thoughtfully enough to do the job that the user wants from the game.

The real reason why licensed games sell well while titles like Okami do not are because they do their job well. A licensed game is supposed to be about the product they're modeled after, that's their job. And they tend to do that very well, meaning they sell very well (particularly since licensed products tend to have very large customer bases to draw from, as well). What is Okami's job, though? And to who does it sell, exactly? Okami's job appears to be to deliver a distinctly Japanese-stylized Zelda-like experience, and very few people are interested in that.

Uh, TOV didn't hit 100k last week. I did not say that the first week TOV was on sale was the week that kids were going back to school. You're either purposefully misrepresenting what I said or you merely misinterpreted it. I think the market is just fine also. What I said was:

It does have a lot to do with install base but more or less to do with legs. However opening weeks really doesn't matter as any game can accumulate a fanbase to buy in the first week... especially in Japan. Install base really only gauges potential. However with DS and Wii... like PS2, there are just so many games releasing a lot of them are just going to get lost in the competition with the others. Probably what happened with those.

But remember sales are determined by marketing, brand appeal, and hype. They are gauaged by userbase. Trust me if userbase meant nothing, every game would be exclusive because they are trying to maximize potential.

Ya know, you just may be right, in 1 out of a million cases. Outside of that, dead wrong.

hey soriku you make some good points, but one i noticed is different a lil.

Inazuma Eleven and Sigma Harmonics got NO advertising AT ALL. Blame the companies, NOT the user base.

is what you said, and it seems in the UK that is advertised everwhwere here.

most target audience is probably uk for advertisement, thats why i have seen that game everwhere.

I don't think so.

Wonder how those games would have sold on the PSP...