Amazing work man, really haven't seen such solidly built info put into a thread in a while.

It looks to be like this PS3 and 360 can get you higher sales if it's a hit right off the bat, but if it doesn't make a nice splash it'll flop really hard, couple that with costs and you might be out millions on top of millions.

Wii can have mild openers and sell a solid amount, but may never reach as high, but you're less likely to have a flop, and if you do it's not as dangerous.

So it's like pick your poison you can either be amazing or die on PS360 or just be solid on the Wii with no really wow numbers but it'll be work work horse keeping steady.

These are really good points.. I'm wondering also.. is it possible to use the statistics to perhaps say if a Wii title sells 1 Million in its first week, it's safe to say it'll sell around 10 million copies give or take 10%? Could you also say that a 360 title that launches with sales of 1 Million should get to sales of 5 Million give or take 10%? I'd like to look deeper into solving that issue.. Then see where it goes wrong, such as with front loaded sequels and find multipliers for them.

So it's possible that if Wii number are small they can still end up with a good result but if they are very large.. You could end up with mammoth sales, not saying that's true but it'd be interesting to look into

Hmm I can't think of many games with large sales for third parties other then Mario and Sonic and the Guitar hero series.  But generally yeah Nintendo games if they sell 1 million or close to it it'll reach 10 million no problem by the end of things.  The "flops" as I've seen them from Nintendo being Wii Music and Animal Crossing are getting close to 3 million sales.

I think the correct way of doing this is to remove any abnormal sellers like Halo 3 and GTA4... as well as Mario Cart Wii and Wii Fit... this games are not normal sellers and they skew the numbers. I'd say anything around the 5 million unit mark needs to be tossed... It's kind of like trying to find out a teams rating you toss out the best and worst games they played... only we need to toss out any abnormal sellers

 That simply isn't reality... you can make a medocer game and it will likely sell well enough on the Wii to get a return on it.  That same game can be put on XBLA and a profit earned.  But a game like Conduit would cost ruffly the same on both the 360 and Wii... the reason being that extra 10 bucks that the dev will get will be able to offset the cost.  The thing that surprised me most was Nintendo and Microsoft take about the same amount of money per game from third party developers.  That could lead up to some big money if the game does fairly well.  I mean you're talking about even if it sold 100k it would still add a million extra dollars in the developers pocket.  I don't know about you, but I think the Conduit will probably sell a little more than that.  That being said if your target audiance is more hardcore  you would be better off releasing it on the 360 than the Wii... you know unless it's a Mario game.

Not bad. It does vary greatly from game to game as the first reply said, but it's still good to know.

I started writing here about why that wouldn't work with large openings, as they don't follow the same pattern. Surprisingly, only a few titles actually broke the pattern by a large amount.

So I guess this could work.

Maybe +/- 20% would be better though.

There are a few Wii titles that completely break the Wii pattern, and rather join the more Ps360-esque ones. Like Brawl, which should end at ~ 20-25% in first week.

I also think people should just ignore Cueil's last post, as that discussion may very well derail the thread completely (which would be a shame, considering how incredibly interesting it is). Just leave it at that it's misinformed, and don't quote him.

I agree please don't talk about third party budget vs. rewards per platform because we'l just get into a war over how Wii games being cheaper/more expensive/riskier/whatever lol

I can explain Brawls results quite easily: It's a massively hyped sequel that had very front loaded sales. Funny that the front loading is similar to the normal sales of PS3/360 games though..

I appreciate the effort put into this data-gathering, but I think it's way too coarse to make it useful in predictive terms.
The obvious problem with categorizing the data by console is that the three platforms have very different library compositions, especially the Wii vs the PS3/360.
As such, trying to predict anything about the long-term sales of a game based on its initial sales on a given platform will be totally unreliable unless the game is homogeneous in genre and target audience with the majority of the console library.
An analysis with real predictive power should try to model the sales of games in a parametric way and gather average parameters for the various genres/contexts.

 Obviously this is a work in progress. The big problem with expanding the info is trying to come up with a solid definition for the different categories of the game. Based on my not quite arbitrary definition of casual and core you still have significant differences between what is needed to sell a million on the respective consoles.