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Current-Gen Price Drop and 360 Shortage
Gamespot is running an article reporting that Activision's Robert Kotick believes that current generation games will drop in price due to the arrival of next-gen consoles. From the article: "Unfortunately for current-generation holdouts, Kotick also said that publishers will quickly shift their development efforts away from today's consoles, which has been the case in the past, when the introduction of the PlayStation 2, Xbox, and GameCube games saw PlayStation and Nintendo 64 development plummet." Meanwhile, the retail chain EBGames has announced that it has presold it's allotment of 360 consoles. From the article: "We are currently sold out of our popular Xbox 360 bundles ... Check back frequently for more opportunities to pre-order an Xbox 360."
I don't really see how this is any different than what happened with the last generation of consoles. Once the PS2 and the GameCube were released, Sony and Nintendo, while still offering some titles on the older consoles, shifted their focus on next-generation strategies and games. Third-party vendors were quick to follow. What the article didn't mention, though, is not only will development fall for the current systems, but product quality will fall as well. Developers will make half-assed attempts to put something out to appease those of us too poor or unwilling to buy a new system out of the game; but we can reasonably expect they're going to shift focus on what will bring in the dough.
I officially nominate Robert Kotick for the annual Grand Master of the Obvious award. For mentioning something that has been obvious to gamers for the last twenty years or so.
There has to be a point missing from what Tor Thorsen wrote. Why did such a topic come up at a Bank of America Investment Conference of all places? Was Robert Kotick trying to dissuade investors from investing in Atari 2600 E.T. games or something? Microsoft and Sony are such massive companies that you can't very well just buy stock just on console performance and Nintendo doesn't sell their stock in the U.S. market. Is this a lame attempt to convince investors to invest in Activision with such a painfully obvious statement?
Most products drop in price when a newer or more desirable product hits the market. It's such a fact of life (at least in the U.S. noting the Japan statement elsewhere) that I could only imagine such a statement from someone who haven't been around any evolving consumer market for the last hundred years or so. The second lesson I ever learned about the gaming market were the price drops after new consoles were released. How to pop a quarter into an arcade machine being the first.