My girlfriend wanted a Wii. We went and got one. We played it a bunch when we first got it, but then we forgot about it. The girlfriend doesn’t play on Live, but she’ll warm up to it, I’m sure.
Yes. A study of game sales in last week or so revealed that for an average title an online component did not add significantly to sales.
Naturally I found the article just after posting. They note that the boost is enough to make it worthwhile to implement cheaply but the figure is a low percentage of actual sales.
Don’t forget that that 10% also includes people who still game on a PS2 or only have a DS or PSP, all of which have rather limited online options. While 10% seems a tad low (especially when you add in all the PC users who game online, which I would guess is somewhere north of 95%), I don’t doubt that the majority of gamers don’t play online.
Well, what would be a more accurate metric? Would it be best to see what percentage of Xbox owners play on Live? Break it down by console?
Sure, but all those numbers are proprietary, so we’ll never know.
And also prone to be overinflated if they can only come from the publisher.
There are LOTS of people on Live, PSN, World of Warcraft, and other assorted folks. That will only increase in number and influence.
Microsoft guards their accurate numbers for good reason (inflated promotional statistics aside). I’d think a reasonable one would be knowing how many unique users played an online game on Xbox Live in a small, fixed period. Twenty-four hours seems reasonable for a sampling to me but a week may be better.
That seems crazy wrong to me (the 4% thing, they even say on the website EEDAR responded to say 4% is wrong) just given the fact that if such a small percentage of games made a profit no company could afford, or would want to, produce games.
I wouldn’t doubt that either, but the idea that it’s only 10% seems very low to me. Less than 50% sure, I’ll take that as a given, but it’s gotta be higher than 20% imo. And no, I don’t have any cites, this is pure conjecture
Also of interest would be to see how much money people who play games online spend per year on gaming vs how much money those who don’t play. It might be a small percentage of gamers play online, but they make up quite a decent amount of the actual game sales (whereas those playing only PS2 games or only DS might buy games much less often, therefore make up a less significant percentage of the market).