I'm insulting you now? Because I said you were playing stupid? Playing stupid is far from saying you are stupid. It's saying you're hard headed. And that's in no way an insult.

I've posted my piece. All you can say to refute it is "nobody knows for sure what the reality is". Thank you for your input.

who's assuming core gamers don't buy TP core games?

There will always be some overlap. You are being to concrete about this. With you it's either all or none. That's not what we're saying. We are saying that certain groups buy within their traditional core demographic and seldom move outside of that. Seldom. Which is why the 3rd party games sell like very few compared to the main 3 demographics.

That's what I said in my OP.
thanks for reading it.

small correction. I'm admitting it isn't provable. Not inaccurate.

and you're right. We are going anywhere with this argument because you aren't arguing anything that has anything to do with my OP other than it's not provable.

I understand that much, but consider the formula you used to calculate the Wii's core userbase. That's like if I averaged the top 5 PS3 games (around 4 million) and claim that's the size of their core userbase.

Anyway, there's a massive difference in third party support between the HD consoles and the Wii. Even when they receive the same games (CoD5), the Wii ends up getting the inferior version (which is usually understandable). The fact everyone is forced to hype The Conduit, a game from a no-name developer, shows what I'm talking about. Those "die-hard" Nintendo fans have bought third party games in the past, there's no reason to think they won't do the same now.

trestres seemed to correlate frontloaded sales with core games. I somewhat agree with it, but then he assumed that because no third party games were frontloaded, the core sticks to Nintendo. What I'm saying is, there are no other games that should have been frontloaded, because there's no core games on the level of Nintendo's, and even the good ones have a tiny budget / are niche with little to no advertising. Not only that, but new IP's aren't nearly as frontloaded, even on HD consoles. Tell me, which third party games on the Wii should have seen heavy frontloaded sales? Or, which would have seen more sales on the HD consoles?

I'll give you a hint, MadWorld, Zack and Wiki, Little King's Story, No More Heroes, etc. are not good candidates. Forget the Wii, we haven't seen niche Japanese games sell much at all on the PS2.

Nintendo is the only big player trying, so they're the only ones being rewarded. Things don't yet look out of place to me. If MH3 flops hard this fall, I'll admit there's an argument to be made.

The greater the console base, the larger the chances are that people buy it for a single game or group of games.

Look at the PS2. It has sold 130M games. But only 4 games have reported 10M sales and only 12 have reported 5M sales. But it does have 206 million sellers.

The Wii has been out for a much less amount of time and has 4 games with 10M in sales and 9 with 5M in sales. It only has 51 million sellers though.

From this, one can conclude the Wii is doing a much better job in moving hyper hits but not as a good a job in moving normal hits than the PS2. Of course, the analysis might change if you factored out the annual sports game user casual update purchases.

Mike from Morgantown

Threads like these are why I like this site.

I think while there may be a big drop off after the huge titles...

and developers and publishers, while would love to have 7-8 million sellers, at the end of the day they are still happy with a profit.

From what I can tell developing for the Wii is cheaper, and with a much larger customer base, there is a greater chance they'll earn a profit.

What I would like to see the average weekly sales of games not in the top 10 or 50...

I.E. if Wii games on average sell 10 k per week, vs. 5 k on PS3 or Xbox, you are more likely to make more money.

thanks silicon.

I can almost guarantee that wii games sell more in what you describe as the "legs". In most cases a game will have sold better on wii than on the HD consoles, especially later on in the life cycle of the game.
It's too bad Wii doesn't really have any yearly installment sports games, because it would be interesting to see how well last years game continues to sell even with a new iteration on the shelves. My guess is that the more casual base would care less about up to date stats and features and more about price and just the fun itself.

all this prooves is for a game to sell well it has to do 2 of 3 things

be an established franchise

contain extreme amounts of fun

or be hyped and advertised to a higher then normal level (this one can be counted 2x if by itself)

How do households with a single wii but multiple gamers who fit into more than one of your groups fit in?

I would suspect there are enough of those to make the kind of analysis you are hoping to acheive impossible.