VERY informative post. Thanks for the hard work you guys.  On average, I'd say the 250K - 500K marks tend to be the break-even points for high-quality games.  Some go higher, some are less, but a large portion of the "quality game" bell curve breaks in that range (I'm discounting a lot of intentional shovelware with that).

I used 5 minutes on getting together the data (well, that's for Ps3 + Wii, then probably a few min on X360), so it wasn't really "hard work"

And Viper, that's a very valid point. There's some lacking data.

I'm also not sure if the 5K + way is decent, as some games are really incomplete data wise.

Also, it isn't actually 5-50K, but 5-44K

And yes, there are some quite big rounding errors and miscounts here, but none should be over 1%. Sorry 'bout it, but doing it completely accurate would take far more time. Still, it doesn't change it a lot.

Thanks for the data but um yeah, any chance of a graph?

 I'm not very good at graphs, and I don't know how I'd do it really (as it wouldn't really help to illustrate the point).

Still, I might try to make one later on.

Added one. It is the % of titles that fail to reach the highest number. Being lower down is better overall (in case you didn't understand that).

How do games fail to sell 5K?

A game that sells that low means the publisher failed to get retailers to buy the game.  Perhaps they convined a few mom and pop shops to carry it but no retail chains.

Good games that sell poory are usually a distribution and marketing problem.

Might want to do a (1.0 - x) inversion on that graph, to make it more clear =)

The Wii really has 459 titles?

 The games that haven't sold 5K are probably not released. either that, or they have no data. They are not included in the analysis. (Only titles that sell 5K +)

This is what I would suspect. The Wii has so much shovelware that selling > 50K is still nice and profitable.