Games Analysts Weighs In On Console War

Gamaustra's latest in its 'Analyze This' series asks the question point blank: Which Console Will 'Win' 2007? The regular series puts weighty questions to business analysts who specialize in the games industry, to get a gestalt opinion on what's really going on. The well-respected Michael Pachter, of Wedbush Morgan Securities, had some of the most interesting comments to review. He says that Nintendo will 'appear' to win in 2007 because of its low price and innovative control scheme, but that Sony will be the winner in the long run. From the article: "My best guess is that Sony emerges as the winner of the movie format war in late 2008, and games start looking noticeably better in 2009. That's when Sony starts looking like the winner of the next generation battle. All of this is pretty far out, and a lot can happen with pricing to change things. For example, if Sony gets down the cost curve for Blu-ray and Cell processors, [the PS3] may be below $300 shortly thereafter. It's hard to say that this will happen before 2009, but it could. That would change everything."

Comments

Re:There's no fucking way

[HappySqurriel]

Well, if you notice DVD empire has Blu-Ray winning the week by a wide margin, the month by a pretty narrow margin and losing the year; this would be quite likely if Blu-Ray ended up having a much better couple of weeks of releases than HD-DVD and not really suggestive of any larger trend.

Eproduct wars has far more statistics and many of the stats are not important for sales; most of the sales stats are pretty split and will change week to week.

The real problem with the parents post is he does the google trends incorrectly

region
city
Languages

Currently the data is only current up to the end of November 2006 ...
December 2006 and January 2007 may have a greater search quantities for the Wii (as people played it) or any of the systems

Re:How will they hang on to developers

[Rimbo]

On top of what you say, Microsoft has a huge cash war chest, while Sony is hanging by a thread financially. Microsoft has more than enough money to tell developers: We'll give you the money to make it profitable to be exclusive to us!

Once Sony is thus destroyed, Microsoft gets the high-end "game/media box" market pretty much to themselves.

Microsoft really has an opportunity to pound Sony into oblivion here. This is something Microsoft has been good at, historically.

Re:Well or why the price must drop

[king-manic]

Personally I see the winning game console being a PC. With the falling cost of high performance hardware getting to the point where the open system is cost competitive on the initial purchase and it will play sufficiently attractive games, then the closed console systems will disappear (unless they want to give them away free, as per the M$ prediction, in that case I will pre order a few thousand for the parts).

No.

I think you have it the otherway around, the consoles are going to eventually canabalize all functions of the PC. Thus the goals of the consoles are for one of them to eventually win the home coputer OS war.

The PC's % of the game market has been stedily declining. In recent years even the raw numeric sales of PC games has declined too. If declining game sales is a sign of winning the console war, then the dreamcast must have won the last round since it's sales declined to almost 0.

Re:2008? 2009?

[Mongoose]

A lot of people didn't get a PS2 until the slim version came out. You can't judge a console's sucess by the people that buy it in the first year, and you can't see a 'winner' in that same period. I hate to break it to you -- consoles are consumer electronics, not fad clothing. I think it's clear the PS3 will be the top of the heap again this generation just due to the games lined up, and blu-ray and the most affordable online store are just nice add-ons. Are you going to tell me when Lair, VF5, Heavenly Sword, etc comes out in Feb./Mar. you won't see PS3s flying off the shelves? What about when the Final Fantasy and Metal Gear titles ship?

If you disagree with me then bookmark this, and come back and read it after these things happen. I think you'll be surprised at your opinion beforehand.

Re:Sony is fine

[CK2004PA]

That's not in any way true. Multiple Apple's sales by 3, and their profit by 4, and you got Sony. Sony has $32B in short term assets. Sony is quite healthy, financially. I don't know where you got your information.
Did you read your link ? Guess not, its data that is one year old, and even with that their Net Income is $1 million per year. You think that is "healthy" ? With 62bn in revenue, to only profit 1 million ?