Sales of the "Big Three" over next 3 Years - Your opinion

[HappySqurriel]

davygee said:

HappySqurriel said:

The PS3 is tracking at a similar rate to the XBox, XBox 360, and Gamecube and will continue selling at a similar rate for the rest of its life. After an awful Holiday 2007 for the PS3 third parties will move the majority of their development resources away from exclusive development on HD platforms and there will be an even split (in resources) between multi-platform HD games and exclusive Wii games; this will result in a larger Wii library with more "Break-Out" titles whilst the XBox 360 and PS3 maintain a small library of more tried and tested games and genres.

I agree to a degree...but what about Sony's inhouse teams and 1st party developers.  3rd party developers WILL stop the exclusive games for the 360 and PS3 until there is a much bigger userbase.  But what would you consider to be a good userbase....15-20m.  Going by my reckoning, both the PS3 and 360 will be there by the end of 2008.  Thats why 2009 will be a bigger year for the PS3 anyway.

I think a 'good userbase' is relative to the other systems on the market; the Gamecube at 20 Million had developers abandon it because the PS2 was pushing 80 Million and the XBox was giving incentives to develop for its 10+ Million North American userbase.

If the N64, Gamecube and Dremacst taught us anything it would be that, regardless of how strong your first party development is, third party support is the key to a large userbase; Mario 64, The Legend of Zelda OoT, Goldeneye, Mario Kart, Banjo Kazooie, Super Smash Bros, Mario Party, Donkey Kong, Starfox, 1080 snowboarding and Perfect Dark were all smash successes on the N64 but didn't provide enough force to push the system to the next level (in terms of sales). Not to be rude but the only series Sony has which could match the sales of many of Nintendo's series on a userbase as small as the Gamecube or N64 would be Gran Turismmo; Jak, Ratchet and Clank, and Socom gained a lot of sales because of the popularity of the PS2 more than anything else.