Activision Wary About Nintendo Wii U Performance

Azuardo said:
It certainly wasn't "clearly stated" that you weren't talking about sales numbers.

Regardless, I find this to be clutching at straws here.

It's extremely likely that there are an awful lot of casuals and not-so-hardcore owners of the PS3, which means any sort of percentage of game copies sold per console units sold is always going to leave quite a low number. You could argue that any game that sells 1-5million is still extremely poor considering the install base numbers. But hey, if it makes you feel better by telling yourself the numbers aren't as bad as they actually are, more power to you.

Sorry, you're right it wasn't clear. I mentioned not using direct sales numbers in another post and it may not have been clear that's what I was continuing to do in the second post.

Back to the numbers. Using percentage of owners isn't very useful when talking about how many people own the game on one system. It's only useful when comparing across different systems with different install bases.

My main point, going back to using Mass Effect 3, is this: If your game is selling to 1.5% of PS3 owners and about 2% of Xbox owners, why is it that when you also sell to 1.5% of Wii U owners it is so disappointing? (This somewhat assumes they are happy with the Xbox/PS3 sales in the first place, but lets assume they are). Obviously when the install base is significantly lower, that 1.5% is going to represent a significantly lower amount. If EA was expecting anything different, then I think they only have themselves to blame because they had unrealistic expectations.

(Trying to say that there were probably a lot of "casual" or "not-so-hardcore" gamers driving the numbers down on PS3 seems ironic since these companies also complain and say that this is the majority of Nintendo's demographic these days (true or not).)

As I stated about, a lot of other third party games are in a similar situation where they have sold to essentially an equivalent percentage of owners on each system.

Call of Duty is one where there is a huge discrepancy so after looking at the numbers it is not so surprising that Activision is complaining, but overall the third party situation isn't nearly as bad as people or companies make it out to be.

( Edited 13.05.2013 18:05 by Sonic_13 )