Topic: A question about Sales numbers...

[Inccubus]

All these sales numbers that get vomited out by game companies who are basically say "Whee look at all the stuff we sold, we rock!", do they take into account the install base when comparing sales numbers from earlier generations?

For example, if an NES game only sold 400,000 copies, but the install base for the system 500,000 units and a PS2 game sells 1 million, but the install base is 5 million is the PS2 game really more of a success? And that's not even taking into account profit margins.

[Ahasverus]

They care more about profit margins, % of install bases mean nothing. GTA V will be the biggest selling game this generaion and will sell a max of 25 million units, that's like 12.5% of current install base, and it will be the biggest success of the entertaiment industry.

[Inccubus]

I wouldn't say the install base means nothing. In fact market penetration is very important. It definitely says something when a larger percentage of the people who can use the software choose to do so.

I think my point is that companies like to use numbers of units sold as an end all be all of success because it sounds better if they don't mention factors like profit margin and market penetration which are all important factors. And any one factor is by itself meaningless without the others.

I can draw parallels on Sega's "blast processing" campaign against the SNES. They harped on the speed of the Genesis compared to the SNES (nearly 2x the processing speed of the main CPU IIRC) but neglected to mention how pretty much every other technical spec of the SNES is quantifiably superior.

[Shiroi Koumori]

I moved it here.

[Inccubus]

Thanks!