I get the impression that Sony is throwing this out because MS has been crowing about their overall attach-rate . . . 360 owners buy more games per owner than the other consoles. That's a great incentive to developers, implying that there's a greater chance to sell your game. This PR from Sony is flipping the meaning of "attach-rate" from "how many different games are bought (attached to a console) by a consumer" into "what percentage of users bought this game".
That's an entirely different metric, and one that developers don't give a damn about. As several other people have commented, if a console has two owners, and they both buy a game, then you could claim a 100% attach rate for that game . . . and the game developer will go bankrupt selling only two copies. Contrawise, selling your game to 1% of console owners is fantastic if the user-base is 100 million owners.
LosDaddie
True, but at the same time, I have been arguing for a LONG time now that attach rate information is equally distorted EXACTLY for the reasoning you provide. For example, I rarely recall hearing about attach rates until the original Xbox was released. ANd suddenly it was in everything MS did. I even recall that the attach rate for the Xbox was greater than the PS2...yet the PS2 had more games and support due to its larger user base.
Attach rates can only be taken so far. At some point they will level out. They don't keep growing and growing. In fact, the more popular a console (ie. the Wii or PS2), the LOWER the attach rate because new users are adopting faster than the rate of existing users buying games. In fact, if you REALLY want to report a high attach rate...just stop selling consoles and only sell games to existing users. Watch your attach rate SKYROCKET.
Second, the next problem with attach rates is everybody just assumes developers look at it, see dollar signs, and then pledge loyalty to the console with the highest ratio. That may or may not be true. However, at no point does this take into account the TYPES of games being sold. What good does a high attach rate do for a developer who wants to make a JRPG for example? Especially if you look at the 360s ratio, and combine that with their highest rated and selling games. What you have is a high attach ratio made up primarily of shooters.
So people like to talk about how awesome 360 fans are for buying tons of games, but are they really? By that I mean, sure, they are buying lots of copies of Gears and Halo and Bioshock and so on and so forth...but what about other types of games? How well are puzzle games selling? family games? Action? Adventure? RPG? Tactics? etc. If you take the fanboy comments to heart you would think that any and all games put onto the 360 are massive blockbusters, when in reality, games onthe 360 are either huge or they see very few sales at all. Nobody talks or hears about the smaller games, just the massive titles. But from a developer perspective...what good does simply talking about attach rates do without proper context?
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