^ PS3 is teh doomz?

But if you only do it relative to the opening week then you obviously exclude a lot of big games.  Hence a game can open to 10,000 units and end up selling over a million and that's 100 times more than the opening weekend.  But a game that opens to 1 million and ends up selling 10 million is only 10x.  Does that mean that one titles has better "legs" than the other.  I'd argue that this observation is completely meaningless because then only games with slow starts can have relatively big legs which will only include Wii and DS titles.  But for the big titles and especially big mainstream titles they are excluded. 

But the main flaw with this definition is it excludes time and time is important when it comes to legs.  With your cases a game could sell 1,000 it's first week and 5 years later it will end up being at 20,000.  That's 20x its opening weekend but do we really consider that  legs.  I'm sure a constant pace of about 10 a week is nice but do we really consider that legs?

Thus why argue for something that isn't purely relative for the opening weekend but relative to time, week by week analysis over a long period of time, and how it performs in the holiday season subsequent from the first along with that of first week.  You are able to get a much better definitnion and it excludes those who are merely capitalizing on poor starts.  Indeed if it can have legs if a poor start did occur but a definition shouldn't just be because of the fact that it had a poor start. 

Geez by this definition what Wii game wouldn't be considered to have legs... word itself would become oversaturated and meaningless if this were the cases.  I'm not changing the definition just correcting a potential primitive use it may have.

@ Zucas, IMO, legs are nothing more than reference titles, i.e. titles that you usually look after when you buy a new console. By logic, most of the sales of games withe 15+weeks in the market are from new comers. Why? Most of the people who wanted to buy it and had the console in the first place, already got it.
Of course, there are some people taht wait for prices to fell, or have other priorites, but I reckon them as a minority. So out of 10k that a game like Halo, Fable or Killzone sells(hipotetically, not actual per week sales in VGchartz), a good chunk(don't ask me how big) is from new console buyers.
So when they buy the console they buy some games and this games are usually the Flagships of the platform. Bottom line, this "evergreens" depend heavilly on the HW sales for their health. You can see this when Wii sales rise, with wii fit and galaxy rising together. Same thing with Halo or Killzone2. So a title that have legs, won't sell very high numbers if the hw it's on is not selling very well.

This is what I got from observing the chartz here and it's behaviour, I might be wrong, but it explains, for me, the legs from certain titles, like Wii kart. Of course, there are others, like Uncharted and COD4 that just got good word of mouth, but the main examples fit like glove in my theory. My two cents.

Well yes it is exactly how I explained it... mainstream. when a title becomes mainstream they have a better chance of being picked up when a console is bought or buying months after due to word of mouth. It would seem we agree on that notion.

Yeah, now I see, we're talking the same thing, but I still reckon this is only part of the explanation. Titles like Valkyria Chronicles, COD4 and RE5, sell mostly beacuse of good word of mouth, they're are not reference titles of that console. This is valid for niche games and multiplats, I think, cause it's not why you bought that console for, they are just good games that people recomend.
I mean, Valkyria is a niche title. Not many people out of the core gaming community now of it (when I say core , I mean people who crave videgames enough to research and talk about them, like we do here, regardless of gaming taste), but when you buy a PS3 and the flag ships, like MGS and Uncharted( and GT5 in the future), and want to know what you should buy further in future, people point VC. That's why it's selling 11k a week after a year in the market. But you can't call it mainstream nor disregard it's legs.

So my point is not all legs are mainstream games. But yes, they explain the majority of them.

Forza 3 is really having some good legs. Uncharted 2 however, not so much in the UK.

NPD doesn't include pc numbers in the console chart. So we have no way of telling what sort of numbers the pc is doing. But obviously since pc numbers in brick and mortar stores have been down yoy for a long time now its probably not huge. But its irrelivant considering the sales of the actual games I said had legs. Starcraft has sold 11 million copies now, which is several million more then what it was before starcraft 2 was announced (it was in the late 9 millions at the time) and the sims 2 sold like 16 million copies. So those sales do build up.

And no-one knows how much wow has sold, but since it has like 12 million active subscribers that means its sold more copies then that.

And by your definition, what blockbuster videogame wouldn't have legs? They are almost always still selling at some level a year after release. It's just the nature of the business. Bottom line is you're taking an established term, and changing it to meet your connotative meaning.

I see no problem with saying Halo has legs for a Blockbuster title. As you could easily compare its sales overall to the opening week, and show how it did comparably better than most similar blockbuster titles.

What's so special about those sales Soriku? They're like your average PSP game...

Jeanne d'arc started out with a 5k first week and is now 200k.

Even crappy games like Valhalla Knights had similar "legs".