Call of Clusters: Black Boxes III
Recently, the newest entry in the absurdly well selling Call of Duty franchise released–Call of Duty: Black Ops III. Although it didn’t break it’s own sales records again, it still did quite well, especially compared to it’s predecessor from last year, Advanced Warfare. What’s interesting about the sales numbers, however, is not how much money it made in the first three days of sales (though that was an impressive 550 million) but where that money came from. Ninety one percent of its sales were on either on the PlayStation 4 or the Xbox One, the two titular black boxes, with that number split fairly evenly with 48 percent for PlayStation 4 and 43 percent for Xbox One. Additionally, it is worth mentioning that if you factor in the previous generation of gaming consoles, the PlayStation 3 and the Xbox 360, it is 51 percent PlayStation and 48 percent Xbox. The takeaway here is that those figures are quite close to each other and because the majority of sales come in the first few days after release, they are unlikely to deviate significantly in the coming days.
The competition between Xbox and PlayStation has been a close race for a while now, and the amount of time that it has lasted shows just how unchangeable each cluster of fans is. In lecture we talked about how if there are two different products, and there are two large groups of people who use each product and they are both very dense clusters, then there is very little chance of them joining. A few years ago when the sixth entry in the series, Modern Warfare 2, came out, I made the decision to buy it on Xbox 360. The PlayStation 3 version of the game probably would’ve been a better buy, but I still went with Xbox 360 because that’s where all my friends were. This is a really good real world example of the cluster effect because even though it is probably better to own Black Ops III on the PlayStation 4 (it gets all the downloadable content the earliest), many people are still sticking with the Xbox because all of their friends are on it. These are two enormous clusters of gamers, and they are probably pretty dense (just from experience, most people are on the same gaming platform as the large majority of their friends), so there is probably not going to be a cascade anytime soon if ever.
http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2015-11-09-call-of-duty-black-ops-3-tops-uk-chart-91-percent-of-physical-sales-on-ps4-xbox-one