There’s owning the competition, and then there’s owning the competition. And then there’s whatever the heck Nintendo is doing right now. Therefore, the competition — such as it is at the moment — has officially been Nintend-owned in May.
I know how we all feel about analysts, and how they wear stuffy suits and sit in cubicles and control the fates and dreams of video game companies with their frantic mouse clicks and flow charts — but bear with me on this one. It’s big.
Wedbush Morgan analyst Michael Pachter has forecast that the NPD sales data for May will show a year-on-year increase in game sales of 16 per cent to reach USD 333 million.
First of all. That’s great. I want sales to go up for all software developers and publishers. Even the Hannah Montana direct-to-the-bargain-bin games that are so buggy they don’t have a level 4 or an ending screen. More software in the pool increases the likelihood that tomorrow’s big thing will float to the surface more often and become a monthly occurrence, as opposed to this Rad Racer effect where we wait out 8-12 month cycles for the next system seller to grace the cover of Game Informer.
With regard to hardware sales, Pachter estimates sell-through of 400,000 Wii, 225,000 Xbox 360, and 100,000 PS3 systems – predicting that Nintendo’s next-generation console will outsell Sony’s by a factor of 4:1.
Over at Game|Life, Chris Kohler waxes pessimistically that Pachter is overshooting those PS3 numbers, since the system only sold 80,000 units in April (N.A.), and there weren’t any real titles to speak of for the system that month. Oh, and there’s also the fact that the PS3 finally managed to break below the 10,000 units per month per week level in Japan last month. I heard the Xbox 360 needed some company down in the cellar over there, but this is going a bit too far.
Regardless, the Wii bubble is going to break any day now. It has to. That’s what all the people who’ve been telling me to wait for the next Final Fantasy before I attack the PS3 have been saying. Do I despise the PS3? Not really. The hypocrites that defend it, however, are the poopsky.