Just doing some data mining.  I’ll leave you to make something of the console-exclusive results until I finish making sense of the extended data.

Oh, and fuck the Nintendo Wii.

Sixty million reasons Wii Sports got a square.

Update: Added the names of all titles that sold more than four million copies.

Update 2: Replaced Forza Motorsport 2 with Gears of War, which was featured in a half-assed PC port.  Mah badz.

Update 3: JPEG compression wrecked the picture quality, replaced with PNG format.

You enjoy video games.  You own a game console.  Last week, Sony called you retarded.  Didn’t see the press release?  There was a slight problem with it:

Sony created this chart.  It epitomizes the entire press release.  You just called a play from the Atari Jaguar marketing machine and told us to “Do the Math”.  Nobody told you the Jaguar was a massive failure.  Sony is now the sixth-grader that didn’t get his way and called mommy a bitch.

People don’t slam Sony because the Playstation 3 is a bad product.  It’s good hardware with a passable game library.  People slam Sony because they took the most dominant market share in video game history and pissed it away.  And according to you, we don’t get that you reverse-engineered the Ark of the Covenant and gave it a BluRay player.  If the Playstation 2 is Bill Clinton and oversaw great economic success, then the Playstation 3 is George W. Bush.

You, Sony, can’t understand that you turned your back on everything that sold 140-million Playstation 2 consoles.

You got on top of the industry by producing an inexpensive media center that was easy to program games for.  Since Mattel and Coleco fought Atari in the first modern console war, only the Super Nintendo won out its generation with the best tech (and that’s if you don’t count the Jaguar and 3DO as competitors).  That’s why you, Sony, attached yourself to a proprietary format that’s only better on the 72-inch televisions nobody can afford and saddled it with a processor that game developers can’t code for.  You eliminated backwards compatability from the system and let the Sony of America CEO say it was to encourage people to buy more Playstation 3 games.  You removed your DualShock functionality and installed a half-assed Wii-Mote in the controller.  Unless your name is Maddox and you have made a living off of insulting the consumer, you do not insult the consumer, particularly when those consumers have a tendency to scream “Bloody Mary”.

You, Sony, thought you could work this because you felt the Playstation name was in IPod territory.  The Playstation 3 was going to be a status symbol.  Hey, your boy Ken Kutaragi said it:  “Our goal for PlayStation 3 is for consumers to think to themselves, ‘I will work more hours to buy one’. We want people to feel that they want it, irrespective of anything else.”  Want to know the problem with marketing an everyperson product as a status symbol?  Generally, status symbols are such because lots of people can’t afford them.  If everyone owned a Lexus, it would carry the same connotation as a Pinto.  But you, Sony, decided the sun shines out your ass and people would slide down rainbows to buy your supercomputer.  Every living organism in the world was going to bipedal, slither, or osmosis their ass into the store and buy half a dozen.

At least when Nintendo was exposed in the early 90’s, it required several home runs from Sega.  Sure, the Nintendo Wii choked out the “friends and family” market, but they couldn’t have done it without Sony’s help.  The Playstation 3 will become an historic example of how not to market a video game console.  When the 2600 caved in, the suits at the top believed the game industry had no boundaries.  People would buy whatever could be programmed onto cartridges.  When Sony’s games division caved in, it was because their people believed the Playstation name had no boundaries.

If I was part of any gamer stereotype, it would have been “Sony fanboy”.  I wasn’t the only one.  It only took you three years to throw it all away.  Enjoy third place.

Sandy Duncan, the former head-of-business for Microsoft Europe, has a bold statement: consoles have five to ten years before they’re an ancient business model. He pins most of the blame on evolving technology, but its implications are interesting:

“[Look] at how quickly Popcap or Oberon are growing, or look at what has happened to World of Warcraft in the last 3 to 4 years as so many more homes have easy access to decent broadband services. Maybe you’ll see YoYo Games competing with EA in 5 years… [and] why not ?”

Casual gaming’s behemoths given a chance to usurp console gaming’s Nazi Germany? May seem absurd, but Wikipedia’s article on the Game Crash of 1983 presents a similar, actually-did-happen secnario:

[Since console-makers were unable to restrict third-party production of games for their systems], [t]he release of so many new games in 1982 completely flooded the market and most stores did not have, or decided not to allocate, sufficient space to carry all the new games and consoles. Inside Mattel, one Intellivision sales executive explained the problem: “Two years of products have been pushed into the channel in one year, and there’s no way to re-balance the system.” As stores tried to return the surplus games to the new publishers, the publishers had neither new products nor cash to refund the retailers’ money. Many publishers, including Games by Apollo and US Games (the ill-fated Quaker Oats games unit), quickly folded.

Unable to return the unsold games to defunct publishers after Christmas 1982, toy stores marked down the titles and placed them in discount bins and sale tables. Whereas the typical game of 1982 cost US$34.95 — about US$75 in 2007 when adjusted for inflation — the discount bins quickly settled on the price of US$4.95 per game. By June 1983 the market for the more expensive games had shrunk dramatically and was replaced by a new market of rushed, low-budget games. Consumers’ trips to the store often began and ended at the discount bin, the uninformed customer seeing cheaper games as more appealing regardless of quality. After a while however, the consumers began to tire of the substandard quality of the cheaper games, and rather than pay the high prices for the dwindling number of high-budget, quality games, they quit gaming entirely.

Budget games have destroyed interest in the quality product once before. It’s happening again for PC gaming, where Epic’s Tim Sweeney argued the little guys got help from those at the top:

The industry, he says, has changed dramatically over the last decade, and that the constant advancements in technology have given game creators an excuse to cater specifically to the tiny portion of PC gamers who own high-end systems.

This shift leaves all those with lower specifications — what Sweeney calls the “mainstream PC” — out in the cold with computers much better suited for “Facebook, MySpace, pirating music or whatever,” and as a result, that becomes those computers’ sole function.

As of today, Civilization: Revolution isn’t slated for a PC release, but it will be on the Nintendo DS! I’m not trying to be the bearer of the gaming apocalypse, but budget games have already found a way to compete with the pay-to-play PC product. With console gaming the only ship above water, what happens if they can compete with the X-Box and Playstation 3?

Don’t say it can’t happen.