Originally Posted by
Leo_A
If consumers were buying too few games you'd of seen its effects much earlier. The Wii has been heavily supported by many publishers, particularly the kind that aren't going to jump ship day 1 to the latest and greatest platform (The shovelware producers). So I would think at the very least it has enjoyed a halfway decent attach rate.
But that's besides the point, attach rate simply can't reveal that software sales are in decline like he was suggesting. It's a metric that measures how many games, on average, that a console buyer has bought. It can't tell you that in 2012, Wii software sales are so low that even shovelware publishers are jumping ship. Yet that's exactly what he was suggesting. At the most, a comparison could show that Xbox 360 and/or Playstation 3 owners have started to buy more games than the competition.
But the statistic can't ever tell you that Wii sales are in decline.
Edit- And quickly searching for console attach rates 2011 in Google brought up an informative post from another message board from last May that suggests otherwise.
"695.37 million [Wii] games life to date divided by 86 million [Wii] systems sold is an attach rate of 8.6 games per [Wii] system.
XBOX 360 - MS is a little coy in their lifetime sales - they release lifetime systems and report an attach rate of 8.9 games - for the NPD - the US market! Lets remember the US is their stongest market, and their worldwide attach rate is lower - in fact, very likely lower than Wii! But even assuming that higher number for worldwide, that equates to 477 million game sold - just 68% of what Wii sold - ouch. And it has been on the market a year longer.....
PS3 Had sold 315 million games as of June 30th, 2010. They have sold about 50 million consoles as of today, so lets take 13 million of of that to give a solid estimate of their 2010 life to date hardware sales. That an attach rate of 8.2, but remember, it is a blu ray player after all..."
At the very least, the Wii is clearly competitive in regards to this particular statistic.
Anyways, this is pretty much pointless. I think there is consensus that releases of interest to the average DP user are virtually done. That the Wii may or may not see a few more years of shovelware releases is all but meaningless.