Data released by both Nintendo and Microsoft independently, revealed that the Xbox 360 enjoys the highest attach rate in the current consoles generation.
Attach rate is the average number of titles each console owner bought. According to Nintendo's data, Xbox 360 enjoys an attach rate of 6.6, followed by Wii which sold 5.5 titles per console sold. In the third place - as usual - came Sony's Playstation 3 which has an attach rate of 5.3.
Expectedly, Microsoft is using the aforementioned figures to brag about its software sales success. "[Attach rate]can be an indication of the health of a system", commented Anita Frazier, analyst for the NPD Group, before adding that it can also be used in misleading ways. "As a system gets further along in its lifecycle and perhaps hardware sales start to diminish, the tie ratio tends to go up because software sales are the bigger draw. If a hardware system is doing gangbuster sales, then the tie ratio can go down even if there are lots of overall sales."
For each Wii sold, Nintendo sold 2.4 first party titles, compared to Microsoft and Sony's first party attach rates of 1.4 and 0.9 respectively. The most recent hardware sales data indicates that Wii has sold a total of 35 million units to date, Xbox 360 sold 22 million units and Playstation 3 sold 16.5 million units.
