Apparently, the Susquehanna Financial Group (sucksawhata?) says that selling 5 games for every Xbox 360 console is too high.
The bean counters find this number troubling because a very high attach rate usually matches the shopping habits of hardcore gamers, a group too small to sustain a mass market gaming console.
Analysts like to see lower attach rates that coincide with casual gamers buying into a console, and buying one or two games, because this would reflect that a console maker is gaining ground in the marketplace. The folks at Susquehanna go on to explain that the Sony PS3 might experience similarly high game-to-console ratios, because of a shortage of consoles to penetrate the market.
The report concedes that growth in attach rates and high rates early in a consoles cycle can be good, but if it doesn't even out over time it might indicate that a console is stalling at retail.
Or maybe it just means that there are a lot of fun, compelling games for the Xbox 360? I may be an idiot here, but 6 million consoles ($1.8B in console sales) x 5 games a pop = 30 million games. Multiply that by an average MSRP of $49.95 = $1.5B for the industry. Tell me again... how exactly is that bad?
[via Planet Xbox 360]