Yesterday someone published a chart showing Nintendo being fantastically profitable compared to other game developer/publishers.

(CHART REMOVED BECAUSE IT WAS NOT MEANT TO BE THE SUBJECT OF THIS POSTING _ IT WAS BORROWED FROM A PREVIOUS POSTING AND WAS ONLY INTENDED TO ILLUSTRATE A LARGE RANGE OF PROFIT AND LOSSES BASED ON COMPANIES AND THE PLATFORMS THEY TENDED TO SUPPORT - THE CHART BELOW IS THE TOPIC I WANTED TO DISCUSS.)

I was puzzled because I could not see how they were doing so well when it was often other companies publishing the huge mega hits like GTA 4 with amazing record setting sales figures from day one. So I did a little investigating and was surprised that this consensus game of the year by almost everybody was rapidly disappearing from the charts after little more than 4 months on the market. I also compared GTA4  to Mario Karts Wii which debuted a few weeks earlier to strong but not nearly as spectacular sales.

Currently world-wide, GTA4 (PS3 and Xbox 360) are at 30 and 40^th place respectively and doing a combined sales of about 64,000 in their 17^th week while MK Wii  in its 20^th week is 4^th selling over 172,000 copies. In North America, GTA4 has fallen out of the top fifty completely to 55^th and 74^th places and a combined sales of under 20,000 while the little Kart holds 11^th in spite of the Madden onslaught, selling a respectable 47,000 copies.

That made me wonder just how much difference was there in the average legs of games judged by the number of weeks they appear in the top fifty. I found the results rather startling.

First off you can’t help noticing that DS games AVERAGE over a full year in the top fifty with games like Nintendogs having sat there for 175 weeks (over three years) and even the newer Wii games are averaging over six months (whether or not you leave out Wii Sports). Even third party games on Nintendo platforms are outlasting HD games, both in number and longevity. The only thing close is the PSP but that is based on one incredibly durable game “Daxter” which has held up for a commendable 128 weeks.

It looks like no matter how well you stack up in the front, it just doesn’t beat a great pair of legs.

weird how nintendo makes the most money but microsoft and sony lose the most

Great read and thank you.

Sorry I had trouble getting the graphic set.

Wow, this is a very nice article, it'll be useful in the future, thank you and great job!

I like your chart.

The only flaw I could mention is the average being pulled up by the likes of Wii Play etc (similar to Daxter pulling up PSP... I believe Daxter has been bundled at some point though, possibly still now)

That problem is kind of fixed by the 3rd party chart though, although it would be dragged up by Mario&Sonic.

Good thread. Very interesting to see. I knew lots of Nintendo games had legs, but to this magnitude? Not bad at all.

Not sure how you got 21.7 average for 3rd parties.... I was just checking to split it into Wii and DS and both averages are above that (Americas weekly), so is that a typo? should it be 23.7?


For reference the split for Wii/DS 3rd parties in America is this:

Wii - 7 games / ~22 week average

DS - 8 games / ~25 week average

Also I get different numbers for Worldwide too.

3rd party Wii: 7 titles / 22.9 average
3rd party DS: 10 titles / 19.3 average (if taking out 3 new releases it's 7 titles / 27.1 week average)

Are you looking at different weeks to me?

Fortunatley a large % of the Wii's demographic doesn't really care about the hype or the relevancy of the game , they care about how fun the game will be as opposed to what review scores or prequels it had.

I think this is why often doesn't get as big an opening week as some PS3/XBOX titles but often performs better in the longrun.