The study, dubbed Console Intelligence Brief 2007, focuses on the Sony PlayStation3, Nintendo Wii and Microsoft Xbox 360 and analyzes the 219 retail and 187 downloadable games made available on the platforms. IT starts with each consoles’ release and it ends on June 1, 2007.
Researchers quietly filled up their charts featuring genre, ESRB rating, gross sales in the United States, Metacritic scores, online functionalities and multiplayer capability as the main factors and got to several (more or less) interesting conclusion.
First of all, it seems that Mature-rated games are the bless children of the industry, as they enjoy the highest average Metacritic scores and the highest average gross sales in the United States.
The rather vague Action genre has the most minions on the market (24% of all games released), but fails to be on the top position in terms of sales. The FPS genre sells better and that piece of info might be the answer to “why are we constantly flooded with bad FPS games?”
And speaking of good and bad games, the study concludes that quality titles sell better than the rest (the research team must be lead by Captain Obvious). In fact, a game with a Metacritic score above 90 sells 531% more than the industry average. Unfortunately, such titles only add up to 2% of all titles released.
The icing on the study cake went to Nintendo and its Wii console. The company did manage to push things in the right direction and release twice as many games (retail and downloadable) than either one of its competitors did during the first 7 months since each platform was released.