Recently, the Capcom videogame company released “lifetime statistics” for its franchises. (Thanks PalGN for the headsup.)
Reading the raw stats doesn’t give too many surprises. The Resident Evil, Mega Man & Street Fighter franchises take up the top 3 positions.
But what if you looked at the whole chart, and divided each sales figure, by the number of titles released? That would tell a very interesting story…
First of all, here’s the full chart. Franchises are ranked according to the total number of sales from all titles…. from highest to the lowest.
Now, lets add an extra column. Here, we divide the “franchise total” by the “number of titles released”. I call that the JOMG franchise power score.
OK, now let’s rank the franchises according to their JOMG franchise power scores. This shows some very interesting results…
So, on a purely bang-per-buck “sales per release” basis…
we now know that…
Commando > Street Fighter
1942 > Dino Crisis
Ghosts n Goblins > Phoenix Wright
Forget ‘pens’ and ‘swords’… we now know…
“The sub-machine gun.. is stronger than the Hadouken.”
Just One More Game 
Okay, this is interesting, but the mistake in the logic may be that by averaging a franchises sales among every title in the series you’re short sheeting the big selling titles in a franchise with the smaller, cash-in, no advertising budget titles. The only way to correct this, tho, is to analyze each game individually. Does that data even exist?
Well I hoped to start a discussion! Of course I have to ask, “how much advertising budget does a great game need”? As for data from individual releases.. I doubt we’d get such detailed figures.
The answer to that question may be disappointing. Consider the following questions:
How much advertising will make a bad game sell well?
How far will a great game go without any advertising (word of mouth excluded)?
Here’s a scenario that could be tested: Create a “good game” with enough budget and whatnot to do a decent job, but put nothing what so ever into advertising. Release it through the “usual” channels (whatever that may be) and let it for for a month. Then start a huge advertising campaign for it’s “re-release” changing nothing in the game but the advertising strategy and track it’s progress.
Now to find a venture capitalist with a penchant for research.
Good thoughts there 🙂
The only problem with your “test” is that the re-release would still be impacted to some extent by the word-of-mouth & editorial coverage of the original release.
Bugger. If only we had a parrallel universe for our 2nd test!