Not that I like to defend PS3, but they have a great attach rate. A good percentage of PS3 owners have 0 games, they don't even have a free game that counts towards their attach rate as several people bought a PS3 because of it being an entry point Blu-ray player and have never bought any games for the system whatsoever. 

I am positive that Nintendo has research that shows that at least half their owners are in the buy only 1 - 3 games per year category.

If you make a good game .. and let people know that you make a good game .. people will find it and generally buy it.

The issue with the Marvelous titles is that unless you (a) read the Internet 24/7 or (b) hang out in game stores, you probably did not even know that these titles were out there/coming.

The games are gamers games. And those take a while to sell on the Wii. They generally move by word of mouth. But the interesting thing is that eventually many of them move decent numbers.

Thus, there is a lot more sales potential for the Wii -- you just have to approach it differently.

Mike from Morgantown

I'm not saying the PS3 has a bad attach rate. I'm saying that the Wii has a better attach rate, and assuming that 20 million people in that attach rate only own 2 games would move the attach rate from 'good' to 'implausible'.

On a side note, I only buy 1-3 games per year. (Maybe 3-5 is more accurate).

I think half of every console base only buys 1 game per year. Attach rate is pretty much driven by that small 5% that buys 20 games a year.

I agree that there's many people who bought the Wii only for Wii Fit and then got Wii Sports Resort with their purchase. There's a lot of women that aren't interested in playing traditional games and bought it as an excercise machine. That's why so many companies are now releasing fitness games and are all becoming successful. Same happened with Wii Sports and Wii Play, they opened a gate to third parties who are terrible and started flooding the market with all kinds of cheap sports compilations/mini-game collections so fast that the core gamer might have been scared with the sudden surge of garbage that they bought another console.

There's barely any margin of growth now for the mini-game/sports compilation genre because of how fast all companies flooded the market, that probably the people who bought a Wii for those kinds of games already have enough games and won't need more in a long time. Well it's happening now with the fitness games, the market is getting flooded once again and we are seeing success after success, until the market becomes saturated and there's no need for more fitness games, like it happened with the Sports compilation/mini game genres.

Whatever Nintendo does, it gets copied. Nintendo are releasing Wii Fit+ so close to the release of the first one, because if they take any longer, the market will be oversaturated and they will not be as successful as they will this Fall. As for Wii Sports Resort, Nintendo is including a new peripheral, which will be the main selling point of the game, rather than the game itself. But as it comes bundled, it will be a brand new experience for those who bought Wii's for sports compilations mainly, so there's a huge market to hit.

What Nintendo really needs to do is focus on the core gamer, outside their longtime and harcore Nintendo fans. They know that any new game of a previously successful franchise that they launch will become successful because the audience is there. However, traditional gamers outside the Nintendo loyalists are too few on the Wii, and Nintendo needs to convince them of buying a Wii, then there's a whole new audience that will start buying core games outside the Nintendo ones. Of course, expanding the market with more non-gamers is essential, that's why they are doing the Wii Vitality sensor, to attract even more first-time gamers, but having the core gamers, the most loyal kind of gamer, with them would be the best that could happen, so there needs to be some big core giant new IP's from Nintendo themselves that could convince many core gamers of buying a Wii and therefore expand the userbase even more. So far, it's all the same old franchises and some new niche games that they don't even intend on releasing outside Japan that most of the times bomb. They need to create a whole new set of big core games, that's it unless they believe that there's no need for that kind of gamer in the audience, which will contradict their Blue Ocean strategy.

Not stupid at all. You see, every big game Nintendo releases that comes from a known IP sells incredibly well, while new releases from them sell terribly bad. Of course most of the core Wii owners are Nintendo fans, if not you should help me find out why majority of games that aren't from known Nintendo franchises never manage to become big hits. Why is that? Why can more traditional games become big hits on the other 2 platforms, while they struggle on the Wii despite having a bigger userbase? Why can't even new core IP's from Nintendo become successful?

Because most of the Wii owners aren't the typical core gamer, I'd say that less than half care at all for traditional games, while a big chunk of those who care are Nintendo loyalists. I'm one of them, I've mostly bought 1st party games in the GC, N64 and Wii era and there's a lot of people like me out there. I firmly stand by my assertion that most of the Wii owners don't care for these kind of games, and then those who care might have bought the Wii for the 1st party offerings. So the remaining part is the one that ends up buying most of the core games, which sadly get never advertised therefore limiting sales.

Core HD owners seem to be the ones who visit the gaming sites and buy game magazines more regularly, since the games are very frontloaded, meaning most of the people knew about them beforehand. There's no big first week successes on the Wii save for the 1st party games, meaning majority of core gamers are Nintendo followers.

You can try to refute this on more than 1 line, would be appreciated.

If you had your way, nobody would be able to prove anything.

I'm just putting together some number and giving a possible reason as to why the numbers are this way. You don't have to go off the deep end and be all nihilistic about it.

I said in the OP that there was some overlap between some demographics and that the numbers weren't completely rigid. It is still a pretty good fit for the data.

To those who are talking about attach rates:

360 is about 8 or 9

say people who bought wii fit bought wii fit, have wii sports, and possibly another fitness game. Like I said, the numbers aren't completely rigid, there is always bound to be some variability. But let's say those people do only own 2 games. 51M wii owners*6 attach rate = 306M 20M wii fit owners*2games=40M. 

266M games /31M owners =8.6 attach rate. And all of a sudden, wii attach rate makes sense with the other traditional console's attach rate.

PS3 has a lot of consoles with 0 attach rate btw. Who knows how many, but GTA4 only sold to about 1/4th of the base, and MGS about 1/3rd. It's possible that the people who own it only for BR with maybe 1 game is ~3-6M

@c0rd

this actually took a lot of work man lol.

Similar "traditional" core games for ps3 or 360 would be games like MGS, GTA, Halo, perhaps COD or other FPSes

people will try to tell you different, but you're 100% right sir.

I'm surprised you don't know the answer. Seems like you're simply playing stupid.

@2nd question

I think you're upset that tres is right. You're starting to move the goal posts. Those "shooters" on the HD systems have all had games in last gen, except Gears.

@Soriku: There are a lot of Nintendo followers out there, not everyone buys the Wii instantly after launch. And for example, these Nintendo fans you talk about might have been waiting for X game to get released and the buy their console. Plus big HW sales happened last year along big releases because Wii was in a shortage and Nintendo sent out bigger shipments for those games releases. It's not as hard to see as you put it.