Lots of games sell 20 million. Every CoD game. Every mario game. Even BF1 sold 20 million. It's impressive but I still think 50 million is a pipe dream.
Dozens of thousands of games get released every generation combining all platforms. Only a couple of dozen games or so sell that every generation (and this is now, way less did it in the past). And only a few ones do it in a single platform. And not every Mario game sells 20 million.
Someone made a great point in the Gamepass thread. Games are just not as mainstream as movies and tv shows. You can put games on TV apps, smartphones and PCs all you want, but the audience is still just a bunch of dudes. You are never gonna get grandma mammy or Aunt Eliza to play TLOU2.
True, dudes play games made for dudes like TLOU2 and granmas will play other type of games made for granmas. Different games are made for different type of players. Candy Crush, Wii Sports, Nintendogs, Animal Crossing or The Sims aren't targeted for the same people than GoW or Uncharted. The granmas who today have 90 years won't play any game, but the ones who now (or in 10 year) have 60 years old may play. And more of the ones after them will play more.
Well whats your explanation for why Nintendo games have a significantly higher attach rate?
In all platforms software revenue (so game sales) are focused on a few companies, so games. A couple of dozen companies get around 80% of the gaming revenue in all platforms.
This means that in consoles most sales get focused on several big seller series/companies. PlayStation has way more big seller games released every year (not only exclusive, counting 3rd party multiplatform games too which looking at IR report they are a bigger portion of total game sales in PS vs Switch), which means even if they sold way over 1600 milllion games for PS4 as of now (versus 632 million on Switch as of now) and considering PS4 has around 2x the attach rate of Switch (more total games sold per console, normal to have more because it's several years older), these sales are spread over more big selling games resulting on a smaller attach rate than the Switch super sellers. Less super sellers = sales focused in less games = these supersellers getting a higher attach rate.
Traditionally the biggest sellers in PS are GTA, CoD, FIFA, Fortnite, Battlefield, AC and so on, multiplatform games that have PS as their best selling platform. Not first party games. GoW, TLOU, Spider-Man and a few more are rare exceptions in the PS history. Nintendo instead traditionally focuses their big sellers in exclusive games way more than PS. If Nintendo would have a more similar hardware to the other ones, porting would be easier so it would get more multiplatform games from the big seller series, so there would be more big sellers to spread sales across them, so attach rate would decrease.
For this same reason you can also explain why Switch also has more evergreen superseller games.
I was talking about exclusives.
TLOU and gow dont span as many generations as mario and zelda, also they span more age groups, most sony games seem to be adult themed games where mario + zelda is for all ages.
This is also true. GoW and TLOU are games for (mostly male) adults, so they limit the demographics who can play the games while Mario or Zelda (+most Nintendo IPs) are more like Disney movies, for all the family: adults and kids will enjoy them. Sony also have other IPs very targeted specifically for kids or like Singstar for other demographics.
In addition to this, GoW and TLOU were created pretty recently compared to Mario and Zelda and are series with only a few games instead of dozens. So they carry less fans from the past.