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PS3 has lowest console attach rate

Xbox 360 owners still buy the most games.

Dark blue icons of video game controllers on a light blue background
Image credit: Eurogamer

There's still daylight between attach rates for market leader Xbox 360, and those on PlayStation 3 and Wii. But the margin is narrowing.

That's according to fresh figures calculated by the studious Gamasutra, which used recent Nintendo presentation figures and a mixture of known numbers and NPD data to arrive at a conclusion. The boffins.

As of September 2008, the site claims that there are 8.1 games sold for every Xbox 360, 5.5 games sold for every Wii, and 5.3 games sold for every PS3.

But the Xbox 360 has been on sale for 35 months, the cheat, while the other two have been around for 23 months. Compare all three over the latter amount of time and Xbox 360 attach rate falls to 6.5.

Microsoft has consistently bragged about the impressive Xbox 360 games to console ratio, recently announcing breaking the eight mark after September's NPD results.

But these figures should be taken with a pinch of salt, as calculations are based on the installed base of each console, an area that the Wii dominates, thus watering down the associated attach rate.

As of September 2008, Nintendo has sold 34.55 million Wii consoles, Microsoft has sold 22 million Xbox 360s, and Sony has sold 16.84 million PlayStation 3s.

US NPD sales for October 2008 should arrive on 13th November, and are expected to reveal a spike for Xbox 360 in light of the recent price cut.

The Top Global Markets Report, which should give an overview of UK, US and Japanese sales every month, was last published back in August. We hope a new one pops up soon.

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