Quote:
Originally posted by SephirothClone
Woo Hoo! Metroid Prime is kicking X-Box Live's ass in!!! Happy days.
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Sephi, lets look at this rationally. First of all, let's take a look at Gamerankings.com Top 10 highest rated recently released games:
1. Metroid Prime (GC)
2. Splinter Cell (XBOX)
3. Metroid Fusion (GBA)
4. Mech Assault (XBOX)
5. Mortal Kombat: Deadly Alliance (XBOX, also on PS2, GC)
6. Ghost Recon (XBOX)
7. Unreal Championship (XBOX)
8. Baldur's Gate Dark Alliance (XBOX, also on PS2,GC)
9. Chessmaster 9000
10. Resident Evil 0 (GC)
Now looking at that list, if you have a Gamecube, you have 2 recently released highly rated games to pick from in the top 10, plus 2 versions of XBOX games in the top 10. If you have PS2 you also have 2 versions of XBOX games in the top 10 to pick from. If you have XBOX, you have 6 games all in the top 10, plus the $49.99 XBOX live. Now, that alone should indicate that Gamecube owners have much less options in terms of games. By looking at online sales charts, you can see that Splinter Cell, Mech Assault, and Unreal Championship are all selling very well. When a userbase has less quality titles to pick from at a given time, it could very well be that more units of the quality titles available would move. In other words, if an XBOX owner only has 49.99 and wants to buy a new game, they have to decide between XBOX Live, Splinter Cell, MechAssault, Unreal Championship, and Ghost Recon. If a Gamecube owner has 49.99 and wants to buy a new game, they really only have to decide between Metroid Prime and Resident Evil 0, the former of which has gotten much better press and reviews. So, it would stand to reason that Metroid would sell well.
Now, putting that aside, you mentioned Metroid Prime kicking XBOX Live's ass. XBOX Live was released a week before Metroid Prime and sold 150,000 copies in the first week. By now, it may have met or exceeded the 250k Metroid Prime figure. In addition to that, though, XBOX Live is a subscription service which generates more game sales. When a person buys XBOX Live, they will be inclined to buy more XBOX Live games so they can get the most out of the 49.99 they paid for XBOX Live. In essence, instead of Live simply being a game that sells well for Microsoft once, like Metroid is for Nintendo or Halo was for Microsoft, it is a service that has sold well and will lead to high sales of additional games over an extended period of time, not to mention premium content downloads and another automatic $50 next year (or 9.99/month, etc) when the 1 year subscription runs out.
It's good news that Nintendo seems to be getting the sales success they wanted with Mario Sunshine out of Metroid Prime, but I'd wait until the official NPD sales figures for the entire holiday season come out before making sweeping generalizations about who is selling more, kicking ass, etc.