As outlets of marketing news define it, an attachment rate is nothing more than the average number of games sold per system. In other words, it determines if purchasers are happy with their consoles and buying more games. Old news, right? Many forum flame wars have been waged about the importance of calculating this figure. It’s absurdly simple; divide the total number of sold games by the total number of systems sold. The console manufacturer with the highest number gets to release that data in a press release, and the inarticulate words start to fly.
Many factors have put the value of an AR to question. How does the shelf life of a console (since all three were released on different dates) affect this? Are high rates indicative of gamers dissatisfied with software purchases? Does the rate take used games and consoles into account? I don’t see how it could; the main purpose of touting these numbers is to get publishers excited to crank out exclusive titles. Conventional wisdom dictates that the more used consoles being traded in, the more used games are on the market. Last I checked, publishers don’t get squat for used merchandise. Furthermore, last generation console attachment rates mostly evened out over time anyways, and there were clear winners and losers in that bunch.
To put it bluntly, as it stands with the traditional way to calculate attachment rates, there’s just too many factors to calculate a “winning” console as it is defined by fans. Right now, manufacturers’ and publishers’ bank accounts determine the winners; technically, all three consoles potentially could turn a decent profit this time around. Nevertheless, there’s no reason consumers shouldn’t get an accurate figure to determine which gamers are most satisfied with their platform.
But here’s another head scratcher: does AR include downloadable content? Would one measure expansion packs differently from small sized full games? How has downloadable content changed how long consumers remain happy and “attached” to a gaming system? The Wii and Xbox 360 in particular are suspect to this inquiry with their expansive library of DLC.
If you’re like me, the Wii meant access to stable, digital copies of classic games. Neither my NES nor SNES has worked in over a decade. With my Wii storing my favorite classic games, I finally bit the bullet and threw out my defective, archaic consoles. In the case of the 360, many titles have grown in size since their initial launch. With comparatively cheaper DLC, more consumer dollars have been spent on gaming than ever before. Sure, you may have just dropped $60.00 on a brand new retail game, but what’s another five to fifteen dollars for DLC to go with it? In addition to getting rid of a console and all its associated games, dissatisfied traders have to consider parting with a hard drive full of DLC as well. How much Gamestop store credit can I get for Super Mario Brother 3 and a Call of Duty map pack?
This generation, AR reports commonly have put the 360 in the lead and the Wii and PS3 following respectively. Compared to its competitors, PS3 drastically lags in quantity and sales of downloadable offerings. Overall, the Wii supports a greater amount of full games; the 360 leads with add-ons. However, since DLC extends the life of a retail game and offers up complete small scale games, wouldn’t DLC reflect poorly on AR? In an analytical paradox, wouldn’t the implications of DLC make for lagging Wii and 360 AR?
On the other hand, games with downloadable demos and trailers sell about 70 percent more than games without. Furthermore, 360 games that facilitate DLC sell well over 100 percent more than games that don’t; PS3 games sell only around 20 percent more. In the case of DLC marking an advantage, is a dearth of DLC what’s really keeping PS3 third in both sales and AR. It’s probably easier to chalk it up to price and low install base (like everything else PS3).
For too long defining an attachment rate has been way too simple for such a complex question. Can’t we do better not just for prospective game developers but for consumers interested in the product with the most pleased gamers? I’m not a mathematician, but I’m sure someone out there could come up with some scientific process. Graduates of mathematical studies, consider this the call. We’ve gone from Einstein’s relativity to Metacritic’s complex scoring, so I’m sure we can do better than x divided by y.
Microsoft announced its financial results for Q3 of fiscal year 2026, including an update on its gaming Xbox business and more.
Not looking good. Hopefully Asha Sharma is able to turn Phil’s disaster around.
To me it's still quite remarkable how they can cash-in 5.3bn in revenue in a single quarter, since their hardware is basically dead.
The stock mark is what makes Microsoft remarkable, They have convinced every institutional and retail investor to just keep piling money into them. Like many big tech giants they are just a big growing pyramid scheme. As long as people keep dropping money into ETF's that cover the market Microsoft will always be liquid. At the same time it is completely stifling innovation and competition. People need to start being more discreet in how they invest their money as it's killing the system.
Riiiiight because people will just flock back to them for one or two games per year.
15+ years of bad performance is what they call irreparable in business. It is time for them to sell off the assets and get out of entertainment.
These declines are on the back of extra revenue received from releasing games like Forza horizon 5 on PlayStation. So I’m being sarcastic here when I said they should go back to exclusives. Killing off a revenue stream from Ps5 sales will only make things worse
The charity event will be streamed live from Gamescom in August.
Thanks to the slip-up of an artist working on the title, we now have more evidence that a new Injustice game is in the works.
The trouble with all these stats is time.
Over time, the average person will buy more games. So the attachment ratio will grow from 0 to maybe 1 the instant the console is launched, and it will rise from there on in. It may dip again when the console drops in price and they sell a lot more consoles but not as many games.
As far as publishers are concerned, the most important thing for them is potential revenue. How likely are the people on whichever system to buy their game?
You need to look at several factors, on a month-by-month basis.
-How many games were released during this period?
-How good were those games?
-How many of those "good" games were sold?
-How many console owners were there during this period?
Now you'd need to standardise it, but let's say (arbitrarily) that we only choose games with a metacritic of 70 or above. Now the average PS3 owner buys:
100 times "# of games sold with mc>=70" divided by ("#console owners" times "#of games release with mc>=70")
percent of all "good" games in any given month. So presuming you are a publisher confident that your game will be "good" then you can expect the average consumer to buy it with that % probability.
This erases many of the issues surrounding the existing system. Of course it will fluctuate wildly, but you could maybe take an average, or use a more complicated method to judge which games are "good" or include all games with a weighting system based on their metacritic average.
There is a similar issue of time with failure rates. People defending the surveyed 54.2% failure rate in 360s are claiming that the PS3's supposed failure rate of 11% is outside industry standards. Well actually, this is because failure rate goes up over time, so you have to choose some cutoff point to say 11% of consoles fail IN THEIR FIRST YEAR. This is why I suspect these failure rates to actually be quite accurate.