We've all heard and probably even said it. After only one week on shelves and another game is labeled a flop. However months later a game can be seen crossing that 1 Million sale milestone so why does nobody bother to notice the pattern? Is it console specific and is there even a pattern at all? We're all about to find out!

I've tallied up the total sales of ALL Million sellers on each platform below:

360 - 141.9 M

Above 360 number does not include: Kung Fu Panda OR Sega Superstars Tennis

PS3 - 64.3 M

With Wii I'm going to give two numbers. The first number includes Wii Sports and Wii Play, the second does not:

Wii - 208.5 M

Wii - 141.27 M

Now we're going to divide each of these totals by the number of million sellers on each platform to get the mean amount sold for each million seller (in the case of Nintendo we are going to exclude Wii Sports and Wii Play, in the case of Microsoft I've had to not include Kung Fu Panda (360) in my results as with a 16k opening and a total of over 2.5 Million in sales due to bundling it would cause an outlier in results. Sega Superstars Tennis will have to undergo the same exclusion):

MeanAmountSold

360 - 141.9/60 = 2.37 Million

PS3 - 64.3/30 = 2.14 Million

Wii - 141.27/48 = 2.94 Million

So now we have the average sales of a million seller on each platform. Here comes the fun part and for me.. The lost of work part.. I'm going to tally the opening weeks sales for every million seller on each platform and add together the sales of my findings for each respective platform.

So firstly here is the total first week sales for every million seller added together and rounded heavily due to % error (remember Wii Sports/Play and Sega Superstar Tennis/Kung Fu Panda are not being considered):

Total1stWeek

360 - 31.5 Million   (31,529,004)  

PS3 - 14.7 Million   (14,710,224)

Wii - 15.7 Million    (15,670,923)

Now the first seemingly out of place piece of calculation you should notice is the odd number of PS3 sales against Wii sales. This is only a 1 Million gap when the Wii actually has 18 more Million sellers than the PS3.

So now I'm going to divide each of the above results by the number of games I used to calculate that result to get out the average week one sales of a million seller* for each platform:

AveWeek1

360 - 31.5 Million/60 = 525k

PS3 - 14.7 Million/30 = 490k

Wii - 15.7 Million/48 = 327k

It's beginning to shape up but this doesn't give us the entire picture and I'll explain why.. Remember earlier I calculated the mean number of sales for million sellers on each platform? Well these are very important because as they correspond to the AveWeek1 sales we just calculated. Here's how:

You'll notice the words million seller* above. The reason why they're like this is because we aren't actually getting the AveWeek1 sales of a ONE MILLION seller on each platform but actually the AveWeek1 sales of these amount of sales per platform:

360 - 2.37 Million

PS3 - 2.14 Million

Wii - 2.94 Million

So for example what this means is that if an XBOX 360 game sells 525,000 in it's first week, if it's the average title it'll hit roughly 2.37 Million LTD once it stops selling. So using ratios we can now work out what the average game on each platform has to get in it's first week to be on track to hit 1 Million sold when they stop selling.

Ave1stWeek -> 1MillionLifetime

360 - 221,519

PS3 - 228,972

Wii - 111,224

So there you have it folks! If a HD console game gets between 200k - 240k it's a safe bet that'll hit 1 Million and if a Wii game gets 100k - 120k it's also a safe bet to assume it'll reach 1 Million.

Hopefully some people will now appreciate that the Wii is a massively different beast in terms of how sales work. 

EDIT: I just realised I didn't actually answer the thread title xD

So to answer that, the % of the MeanAmountSold in the first week of sales is:

360 - 22.15%

PS3 - 23.33%

Wii - 11.12%

hopefully I did that right :P looks right..

Interesting, but of course it varies greatly from game to game. Most shooters tend to have much smaller legs, with more casual games having longer legs. So for most shooters you will probably need closer to 300k to reach 1m.

Of course there is no concrete pattern, but very good research nonetheless

That's some nice statistics there, there'll be some minor problems with the data due to what munkeh mentioned, as well as the fact that games havent stopped selling etc. But on the whole, well done

Interesting , I wonder if how accurate this is but this seems very good attempt at the very least and I applaud it.Nice Work.

Yes some things are a bit off which is why I placed the large %error of around +or-10% just to keep it fair and also didnt include packaged titles. It's a rough estimate but I think it's fairly accurate for what it is.

Yeah, it is the most accurate way of doing it, and interesting when we look at things like KZ 2 launching with 700k, so maybe looking at 3m? That is the next step, seeing if doubling your first week sales will lead to double final sales, and of course the holiday effect

Part of the problem with threads like this is that we have no idea how accurate the numbers are in the long run. For all we know most of games being counted as million sellers may not even be close to being million sellers. Once they drop out of the top 10 (or 40 in the UK) it's all guess work where even a few thousand over every week can result in huge differences in the hundreds of thousands over a year.

Good work ;) And I agree with Munkeh... we should look into what hapenes after a game has double or tripled those opening numbers...

uh, why would u cut out wii play, thats not bundled is it? i actaully thougth 22 million people bought it

Isn't the point of VGC that we get more data than just the top 10?