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If you think about the best selling games in recent years, practically all of them have a compelling, unique concept.

Huh? All the truly original games that I've played recently have completely tanked, sales-wise. Ico, Rez, Noone Lives Forever, you name it.

For comparison's sake, let's take a look at some data on successful games. Top sellers of 2003, according to NPD.

1. Madden 2004
2. Pokemon Ruby
3. Pokemon Sapphire
4. Need for Speed Underground
5. Wind Waker
6. Vice City
7. Mario Kart: Double Dash
8. Tony Hawk's Underground
9. Enter The Matrix
10. Medal of Honor

Of these, I know that 7 are sequels -- some to strikingly original games, I must admit -- and 1 is a (bad) movie adaptation. Anyone want to weigh in on Medal of Honor and Need for Speed? As far as I know, they're respectively Just Another WWII shooter and Just Another Racing Title.

The 2002 Top Sellers:

1. Vice City
2. Metroid Prime
3. WWE: Shut Your Mouth
4. Tony Hawk 4
5. Yu-Gi-Oh! Eternal
6. Madden 2003
7. Splinter Cell
8. Lord of the Rings
9. Mortal Kombat: Deadly Alliance
10. Metroid Fusion

Six sequels, one movie adaptation, one original game (Splinter Cell) and again, two I'm unsure of, Yu-Gi-Oh and "Shut Your Mouth."

I'm not seeing a compelling case here for practically every top-selling game having a compelling and unique concept; I'm seeing the opposite.

... Madden 2004, Christ.

If you think about the best selling games in recent years, practically all of them have a compelling, unique concept.

Huh? All the truly original games that I've played recently have completely tanked, sales-wise. Ico, Rez, Noone Lives Forever, you name it.

For comparison's sake, let's take a look at some data on successful games. Top sellers of 2003, according to NPD.

1. Madden 2004
2. Pokemon Ruby
3. Pokemon Sapphire
4. Need for Speed Underground
5. Wind Waker
6. Vice City
7. Mario Kart: Double Dash
8. Tony Hawk's Underground
9. Enter The Matrix
10. Medal of Honor

Of these, I know that 7 are sequels -- some to strikingly original games, I must admit -- and 1 is a (bad) movie adaptation. Anyone want to weigh in on Medal of Honor and Need for Speed? As far as I know, they're respectively Just Another WWII shooter and Just Another Racing Title.

The 2002 Top Sellers:

1. Vice City
2. Metroid Prime
3. WWE: Shut Your Mouth
4. Tony Hawk 4
5. Yu-Gi-Oh! Eternal
6. Madden 2003
7. Splinter Cell
8. Lord of the Rings
9. Mortal Kombat: Deadly Alliance
10. Metroid Fusion

Six sequels, one movie adaptation, one original game (Splinter Cell) and again, two I'm unsure of, Yu-Gi-Oh and "Shut Your Mouth."

I'm not seeing a compelling case here for practically every top-selling game having a compelling and unique concept; I'm seeing the opposite.

... Madden 2004, Christ.

Sorry, here's the article I'm referring to. $7.2B in software sales including both PC and console. First time ever for us.

Firstly I have done my own analysis of TRSTS Data on the console market. It is very interesting to note that for the period I was examining (last year) 84% of the money was being made by 16% of the titles, which is a very high degree of polarisation for a market. For me this was indicitive that:

• there are a lot of bad games around
• that games are too highly priced for consumers to feel safe making 'impulse' purchases.

Online delivery has the opportunity to change all of that, as finally we can adopt a pricing scheme which is able to cater more fairly to ALL of the players, and no longer just to the hard-core. The effect of that should be that we are able to get more game players, as more people will be able to purchase at a value they think fair.

There are at least 2 models which can be applied to online delivery, subscription and micro-payment. These are not mutually exclusive, and cater to different sorts of player.

Subscription is very analogous to Pay TV channels. For the most part there would be a catalogue of titles available to play within your subscription each month. This caters to the person who has a given amount of time for video games each month, however allows this player to enjoy a wider variety of titles than traditional delivery. Like in the PayTV realm there is still the option of having special one-offs, which can charge what they want. That's just life.

With micro-payments, then you would only pay for what you actually play, and would be presented with an account at the end of a period. This model caters to the lighter gamer, who probably has other uses for their leisure time. However by offering this, then a distributer is able to significanlty lower the cost of entry, thereby making gaming finanically acceptable to a whole new set of people.

The original author seems to fear change - and automatically assumes that because the pricing model changes he will be worse off. I believe that nothing could be further from the truth. Capitalism protects us as consumers, because if one company starts building in unreasonably high profits, then another company will come along and take away all of their business! The costs of digital distribution are already significantly cheaper than opening up physical shopfronts, and this is only set to get cheaper.

Bringing new gamers in to play would be (and should be) where game's companys are able to increase their profits. Anything that gets more couch potatoes doing something stimulating, and away from the TV is a very good thing.

hell, microsoft will be in the black shortly.

Um, no. I hate to burst your "I bought an Xbox, so it damn well better succeed" bubble, but Microsoft is demonstrateably nowhere near having brought in $1 billion in revenue from the Xbox. Look at their last few quarterly reports. You'll see two things. First, they group Xbox revenue in with revenue from MSN subscriptions, PC games sales, and consumer software. Basically everything microsoft makes that's not Office, Windows, or a server product, and all the revenue (not profits, revenue) from MSN. Second you'll see that they bring in under $2 billion a year with all those things. There is NO WAY that Xbox accounts for half of Microsoft's non Windows/Office sales, especially since those numbers aren't significantly increased from the previous year when Xbox didn't exist. Not only that, but revenue figures don't take into account the expenditure for building each device.

Estimates I've seen tend to agree that Microsoft must sell between 10 and 20 games to break even on an Xbox sale. How many games do you have for your Xbox?

The xbox is selling very well

Again, bullshit. There's loads of market research that shows Xbox in an uphill battle for second place. http://www.instat.com/press.asp?ID=390&sku=IN02004 1ME

You need to shell out $3k for the numbers, but it's not to hard to figure it out from the abstract. If sony sold >20 million consoles in the last 12 months, 31 million consoles were sold overall, and Nintendo and Microsoft have sold roughly equal numbers of consoles, you can see that the Xbox is not selling very well compared to PS2. That means there are 40 million PS2 in people's houses, and ~5 million Xboxes out there. Also, if you head over to NPDFunworld, you'll see that for the last 6 months Xbox has had on average 1 game in the monthly top ten based on sales. That's not anything to write home about, especially when there are typically 6 PS2 games and 3 GBA games on the list.

Maybe someday there will be enough good Xbox exclusive titles out there to get more people to shell out the $200 for an Xbox, but with microsoft already planning on releasing Xbox 2 in just over 2 years, and 90% of the good xbox games being available on other platforms, Xbox sales may not be picking up anytime soon.

Now, what helps you most in the long run? Market share.

You mean that MS finally read those business books from 1997? If market share is what really helps you in the long run, explain to me what happened to companies like egghead, and bigstar, and DrKoop, and (Insert your favorite failed .com here)...

The platform that sells software wins. Period.

(Console software sales statisitcs for Q1 2002)

Here's the full press release from NPD that triggered the article on ZDnet.

True, the Game Boy doesn't have much to do with the console wars described here. But look at the top sellers [npdfunworld.com] of 2000:

1-3) Pokemon Games (Game Boy)
4) Pokemon Stadium (N64)
5) Tony Hawk 2 (PS)
6) Legend of Zelda: Majora's Mask (N64)
7) Tony Hawk 1 (PS)
8) Gran Turismo 2 (PS)
9-10) Pokemon Games (Game Boy)

Note there are no Square games on that list, despite many of their games, including Final Fantasy 9 coming out! Also on the top 10 game companies of 2000, Square is not listed (and Nintendo is #1).

I think everyone's overestimating how well Final Fantasy games sell. For geeks here like us, we'll snatch up Final Fantasy, but for the teen and college demographic of the PS2 and X-Box, games like Madden football (the #1 PS2 game of 2000) are much, much bigger sellers.

As for why Playstations sold more than N64's despite N64 having much stronger franchises in terms of sales (and this applies to PS2's over Gamecubes), I think it's simple. Marketing and image!

True, the Game Boy doesn't have much to do with the console wars described here. But look at the top sellers [npdfunworld.com] of 2000:

1-3) Pokemon Games (Game Boy)
4) Pokemon Stadium (N64)
5) Tony Hawk 2 (PS)
6) Legend of Zelda: Majora's Mask (N64)
7) Tony Hawk 1 (PS)
8) Gran Turismo 2 (PS)
9-10) Pokemon Games (Game Boy)

Note there are no Square games on that list, despite many of their games, including Final Fantasy 9 coming out! Also on the top 10 game companies of 2000, Square is not listed (and Nintendo is #1).

I think everyone's overestimating how well Final Fantasy games sell. For geeks here like us, we'll snatch up Final Fantasy, but for the teen and college demographic of the PS2 and X-Box, games like Madden football (the #1 PS2 game of 2000) are much, much bigger sellers.

As for why Playstations sold more than N64's despite N64 having much stronger franchises in terms of sales (and this applies to PS2's over Gamecubes), I think it's simple. Marketing and image!