Some math. (Destiny)

by narcogen , Andover, Massachusetts, Thursday, August 28, 2014, 03:51 (3749 days ago) @ Cody Miller

Taken from a reddit survey, it looks like not very many people are opting for the PS3 version. The real numbers are similar. The only reason I'd go with ps3 is so when you get a ps4, your guardian transfers over.

Looking at all the figures for preorders and the like, it's something like <15% playing on last gen.

How does that figure?

The installed base of the 360 and PS3 combined right now is probably somewhere in the neighborhood of 200M.

The PS4 just hit 10M and is doing better than the Xbox One, at least worldwide if not also in the US at this point. Let's call that another 10M just to be on the safe side.

That's 100M consoles last gen, 20M this gen (optimistically). So there's a ratio of about 10:1 for the last generation compared to the current generation.

Perhaps preorders skew towards the next gen as a percentage of all expected sales, but it's hard to see Destiny hitting the kind of sales figures that have been talked about for the Halo franchise (or up to twice that, given the expanded platform availability) without some really insane attach rate on next gen if only 15% of those sales are coming from the last generation of hardware.

I think the original Halo's attach rate was close to 50%, in part because it was a first party launch title.

To sell, say, 10M copies while getting only 1.5M from the 200M owners of PS3 and Xbox 360 means getting 8.5M in sales from 20M next gen consoles. That's an attach rate of 42% (average for both next gen platforms) for something that's not a launch title or an exclusive for either platform-- although to be honest, Sony continues to promote the game as if it was an exclusive, and Microsoft continues to let them do it.

To sell 20M copies-- which would not seem unreasonable, that's double what Halo titles get which are only ever out on one company's platform, current gen only-- that would require a next-gen attach rate of over 80%, which I'm guessing is probably unheard of for any franchise on any platform that doesn't include the name "Mario" in it.

It'll be interesting to see if Bungie's 360-owning following gives the new title a boost on either of Microsoft's platforms or not.