Analysts Predict Consoles Sales Peak Reached

Thanks to Yahoo News for reprinting the press release regarding financial analysts' predictions that the current videogame console cycle has peaked. According to a spokesman for U.S. Bancorp Piper Jaffray, "We believe spring 2003 marked the midpoint of the current video game cycle", suggesting 2003 "will be the peak year for unit sales of current generation hardware." This may mean leaner times before the next generation of console hardware debuts, predicted by Piper Jaffray for "autumn 2006", and meanwhile, the company is forecasting "...that 22.3 million hardware units will be sold in North America in 2003, a modest increase from 21.1 million units in 2002 and will subsequently decline in 2004 to sales of 20.3 million units as the installed base of video game hardware becomes saturated."

Comments

Re:Not a fan, but . . .

[kisrael]

Also, with so many people having computers these days, why have a console? Sounds like redundant spending to me.
Sigh. We've been through this many times. Consoles offer different thing than computer games: less online play for the most part, less download mods, and less customization in general, but bigger screens, a different and in some ways much more varied selection of quality games, good standard controls for many games (less so for FPS and RTS) and a pretty much iron clad guarantee that the game will work. The cost is comparable or possibly much less than the cost of keeping a PC up to date w/ video cards and what not.

And despite stuff like the N-Gage and random barely-better-than-homebrew systems coming out, roughly speaking, this generation is defined by consoles released on or before the end of 2001.
(PS2 2000, Xbox, GC 2001, GBA 2001, maybe DC 1999) Every other console has been a day late and a dollar short.