I really do have to ask... is this a serious question or an attempt to troll?

The 360 has always maintained a very high attach rate even before there ever were ads on the NXE.  And most of the ads are not for games... so... usually they are ads for Mountain Dew sponsored give-aways or car companies or Xbox Live content.

The 360 higher attach rate is due to its year lead in the market.
Thats why its important to look at the current attachrate data as well.

As to the graph colours I will get to them ;)

I have updated till December and corrected the colours for confusion.
There is an interesting drop to be seen in the Monthly SW over Monthly HW graph.
And otherwise the graphs speak for themselves

Enjoy and let me know any comments ;)

NES
Japan - 11.764
America - 6.790
Other - 5.057
Total - 8.096

SNES
Japan - 11.359
America - 5.781
Other - 5.737
Total - 7.722

N64
Japan - 7.175
America - 6.886
Other - 6.394
Total - 6.834

Game Boy
Japan - 4.836
America - 4.326
Other - 3.636
Total - 4.221

GameCube (End of 2005)
Japan - 6.693
America - 9.838
Other - 8.550
Total - 8.945

Game Boy Advance (End of 2005)
Japan - 4.183
America - 4.728
Other - 3.603
Total - 4.300

Nintendo DS (End of 2005)
Japan - 3.246
America - 3.700
Other - 2.624
Total - 3.216

Xbox (Unofficial, End of 2004)
Asia - 4.706
America - 9.773
Europe - 8.200
Total - 8.945

Xbox360
No info

PlayStation (End of June 2005)
Japan - 13.201
America - 9.122
Europe - 7.552
Total - 9.367

PlayStation 2 (End of 2005)
Japan - 8.454
America - 11.222
Europe - 9.294
Total - 9.885

PSP (End of 2005)
Japan - 1.857
America - 2.892
Europe - 1.892
Total - 2.269

http://forum.pcvsconsole.com/viewthread.php?tid=11055
http://forum.pcvsconsole.com/viewthread.php?tid=14535
http://forum.pcvsconsole.com/viewthread.php?tid=14452

I have updated the totals till end of February.

Included here are  the quick references to the graphs

PS3 and Wii exchanging places in the fight here and there and an interesting drop in current attach rate in feb for the wii.

Great thread. This is all VGChartz data, right?

i didn't buy games until now.... i borrowed my demon souls xO.

and didn't buy anything until ff13 god of war 3, collection

i still plan on buying more games but later in there is some JRPG i need to catch on... but better on middle year break

Neat thread but um holy crap! I am a nerd because I am more thantriple the Wii games per console average.

Yip this is all VGChartz data, I try update it monthly and go about a year back to update all the data.

@Games4Fun: I think you will find that most folks who visit these sort of forums are in that boat as the average for each console is only about 2.something purchases per year. ;)

After a long hiatus I decided to try ressurect this, although it took a little more effort to get the data now that the monthly charts are missing. I will also try keep records for each timestamp I do this for. For now here is the data until the end of August. Please discuss :)

First up Monthly Software Sales:

followed by monthly Hardware sales:

Now we start to look at attach rate, to start with a graph which provides no real information Monthly SW over Monthly HW sales:

What this graph shows us is as we expected software sales are increasing faster than hardware sales.

Now onto more interesting graphs, the current attach rate, that is monthly sales over total hardware. This gives us an indication of how software is selling to the existing user base:

Here we see that except for the inital start the three consoles actually follow very similiar sales patterns with an almost identical current attachment ratio

UPDATE: updated till end of August