Right so, to answer a few questions I did a bit of analysis on Core Wii titles, and Casual PS360 titles. I couldn't come up with a definitive description of a casual or core title so many game types are left off both lists to attempt to satisfy the majority. If you feel a game should be included but is not I would be glad to re-run the numbers so long as you can give me a good arguement for it. Some games were excluded due to incomplete data that would horribly skew the numbers down. For example Red Steel is out because it has no European weekly data despite having sold half its total there.
For the purposes below all sports titles, rhythm titles, and games designed specfifcally to appeal to a casual audience as mentioned by the developers are listed as casual. Core titles are defined by more traditional gameplay types like platforming, fighting, FPS, etc. Racing games are excluded from both lists as there is a case for it to be classified as either or both depending on sub-genre.
For the 360 the aevrage opening for a million selling title is 154k. This is significantly lower than the 220k that is average for a million seller in general which suggests the core titles skew the data significantly higher. This is likely due to large launches like GTA4 and Halo 3. Those are likely mitigated by the extremely low opening of some million sellers that were bundled later like Kung-Fu Panda and Viva Pinata which opened at 17k and 34k respectively. These are not the only anomalously low or high titles, but they are the biggest examples.
For the PS3 the average is an even 200k for the casual titles. This is much close to the 228k that is the norma across the system. This points to the bundled titles being the biggest reason for the decreased number for the casual 360 titles. Of course other points against it are the abnormally large openings for soccer games due to the stronger European and Japanese fanbase for those games. They are no really huge anomalies in the opening week sales which is also probably the reason for the higher opening week general sales. It also doesn't help that the games million selling casual titles are apread across 4 differet game series.
The Wii core titles have a lot more variance. A couple titles that should be core have to be excluded due to incomplete data and that annoys me. But there are two sets of numbers I ran. Including all titles you get an average opening of 188k. This is far higher than the 111k average needed for a Wii game and seems to indicate a lot of the lower number comes from casual games. If you exclude SSBB though the number plumets to 140k. SSBB is a rather large anomaly amongst Wii games. The next 4 highest launches combined are not as large as SSBB's opening week. The data certainly suggests either way that the Wii core game has much stronger legs than the average PS360 core title, and the average PS3 casual title.
