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Seihyouken on 04 February 2009
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badgenome said:
Seihyouken said:
mrstickball said:
Seihyouken - Exactly what kind of major Playstation 3 exclusives have exact target dates in 2009 that are going to erode Microsoft's marketshare?

Well if you want to put it that way, then Uncharted 2, Ratchet & Clank Future 2, M.A.G., and Final Fantasy XIII in Japan (All confirmed for 2009) are bigger system sellers than anything Microsoft has coming for the 360 this year so far and that's if you exclude Gran Turismo 5 and God of War III which are both still currently targeted for late 2009 releases. Of course, none of these game have "exact" targets, but really, none of the 360's upcoming releases past April have exact targets either.

I mean, what exactly is going to move a significant amount of 360's this year? Halo 3: ODST and Halo Wars won't, because Halo 3 has already effectively saturated the market for the Halo franchise. Ninety-Nine Nights II, Lips 2, Naruto 3, Scene It? 3, and Blue Dragon 2 are all sequels to games already released on 360 on top of the fact that they are relatively smaller releases. Forza Motorsport 3 could move a nice amount of consoles, but for one it's another sequel to a game that has saturated the 360 market and secondly, it doesn't even have a release date. There's always the possibility that Ninja Blade or Alan Wake (particularly the latter) could be runaway hits like Mass Effect, however the same could easily be said about any new IP including White Knight Chronicles, Demon's Souls, Quantum Theory, Heavy Rain, EyePet, Free Realms and other new exclusive franchises on "target" to come to PS3 this year.

As things currently stand, Microsoft's greatest system sellers this year are Star Ocean 4 and Splinter Cell Conviction. The former of which is very borderline of being substantial and the latter being a simultanious PC release that, unsurprisingly, doesn't have an "exact" release date.

I agree that the list of known 360 exclusives is pretty thin, but why do you think of more Mass Effect, Ratchet & Clank, and Uncharted as being system sellers while discounting Blue Dragon, Forza, and Halo as being able to shift any hardware?

Mass Effect, Ratchet & Clank and Uncharted are in that sweet spot as far as market saturation goes. Taking a look at sales, they are at 2.3 million, 1.6 million, and 2.5 million respetively. They're all hugely popular franchises that have plenty of room to expand on the past markets and sell systems if they continue to grow and improve.

In comparison, Halo (and Forza to a much lesser extent) have all but completely saturated the market. Think about it, exactly how many people are willing to purchase a console for a spin-off or an expansion when they already could have purchased one for the main numbered sequel well over a year earlier? Almost nobody. On the other side of the spectrum, we have Blue Dragon that has barely managed to sell 600k with almost two years on the market. Even if a sequel vastly improved on the original in every way, it'd be very difficult to reach even a million sales. It's very inconsequential in comparison with the others.