Had a thought...
Can the first party exclusive franchises basically be considered niche this gen? Halo, Bloodborne, Forza?
Are exclusives now what the mid-tier games were last gen? Not amazing sellers, but nice middle of the road sellers appealing to a more niche crowd?
My first thought was that exclusives have
always been niche, mid-tier stuff. I guess nowadays there's stuff like Uncharted, but I'd consider Bloodborne to be a niche, mid-tier game, and I think that looking back, stuff like that has always been the biggest of the exclusives.
Yeah, stuff like Gran Turismo and Halo or even Uncharted and Gears are things, but I typically think of stuff like Bloodborne or Dreams or Wipeout or Carnage Heart or Journey when I think about exclusives. Then "multi-platform" would be the lowest-common-denominator stuff like Madden, CoD, Batman, etc.; Top-Ten Stuff, basically.
According to NPD Group data, this year hardware bundle sales were up by 500,000 units, or around 2% of game sales year-over-year.
Bundles are becoming an increasingly attractive value proposition for the average American consumer interested in software.
Sorry, but the placement of the phrase "year over year" has me a bit confused. Are you saying game sales totaled 25M units, including copies moved with bundles? 500k was 2% of the total? What about bundles that come with two or three games? Did they count double/triple towards that 500k?
Takeaways:
- 87 fewer titles released on PS4 and Xbox One than time aligned PS3 and Xbox 360 (20% fewer disc based games this gen vs last)
- 86 fewer titles have released with GameRanking scores at 69.9 or below
- 39 titles released this gen have not been reviewed, compared to only 4 last gen (title must have 5 or more reviews to be included as "reviewed")
- Higher review scores are more likely on PS4 and Xbox One as a % of all review scores given
- 33% of games released this gen have scored an 80.0 or above, versus 31% of games released last gen
Good stuff. <3 So to be clear, Conclusion 4 is compared to PS360, and says scores are generally higher this gen?
The first two points would seem to indicate that what went missing at retail were the crappy sub-70 games, and Conclusion 4 would seem to support that. Further, the final conclusion would also support the idea that rather than getting a higher number of "excellent" games, we've mostly just eliminated the crap. That said, there
are fewer 80+ titles than last gen, but again, those drops are somewhat dwarfed by the drop in lower-quality releases. However the
huge caveat to all of this is the fact that a lot of games are simply going unreviewed this generation when compared to last, which makes our gen-over-gen comparison a lot less apples-to-apples.
Caveat aside though, it does seem like most of what was lost was the critically weaker games, and the heavy hitters haven't really gone anywhere regardless of what's happening further down the chain.
