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http://dubiousquality.blogspot.com/2008/05/console-post-of-week-they-said-what.html
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What developers and producers are trying to do is estimate the amount of sales a particular title will net. Systems sold will tell you how large of a potential audience will have, software sales will tell you how many pieces of software have been sold for a particular system, and total software will tell you how many particular titles are available. Attach rate is a function of the software sales per unit, which in itself is a pretty benign statistic, but we've given it a name and people have started using it now that their scared 360 has been outsold by the wretched excuse for a console known as the Wii. Unfortunately, few people have actually taken the time to think about the significant of this particular statistic, but if people actually put thought into what they say on the internet then it would be a much quieter place.
Now, what people think attach rate tells is an estimate of how many units a particular title is expected to push. That is, if the attach rate is A and there are a total of T available titles, then the proportion of users who bought the title is A/T=p and with U units sold the expected number of titles we expect to sell is p*U GRATS WE'RE DONE. I'm sorry, but it doesn't work that way. The assumption with this model is every title sells a roughly equal amount, which anyone with half a brain when it comes to video games can tell you is most definitely not a valid assumption. In fact, what they're finding with the 360's attach rate is it's entirely dictated by the number of "AAA" titles produced for a system (I believe the attach rate is about 60% of the number of "AAA" titles), so even that is a very lousy predictor for success on the system. The actual statistic developers and producers want is much more complicated and depends on a wide array of virtually characterizable measurements that is not represented in one single scalar value.
The result? Overall attach rate doesn't mean jack shit.
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