Michael Pachter predicts Jan NPD - Wii 500,000 and PS3 300,000

[staticneuron]

Michael Pachter - analyst - Wedbush Morgan Securities "I don't think there are four million people in the world who really want to play online games every month." "At the end of the day, we don't play games for social interaction … We play games to escape." Microsoft's strategy is "absolutely flawed," he said. “Take-Two is cheap and Atari is really cheap. Investors mistakenly look at the group as either being big and going to thrive or small and going to go broke.” “Warcraft is so good and so good-looking that it got this immediate attraction; everybody who would ever consider playing an online game said, 'This is the one. I gotta try it.' And what'll happen is inevitably, like the health club model, after you pay your 30 bucks a month for 3 or 4 months and you only go once a week, you realize it's not worth it and you split. That's what will happen with Warcraft ... I think it's going to roll back to a million. I'm not predicting it's going to happen in three weeks; I'd guess it has a half-life of 6 months to a year,” “Given continued uncertainty among consumers about the availability of Xbox 360 units, we think that slow sales may persist in December.” “The best business for a publisher is to give people what you know they want. And what you know they want is a sequel to what they wanted last time. So we don't see a whole lot of innovation.” “Clever and different and new doesn't necessarily work unless you convince consumers that they really want it.” "Who might Amazon tap for third-party distribution? Why not Blockbuster, suggests Pachter. Blockbuster probably wouldn’t mind helping out a competitor, because Amazon would probably be satisfied with 10% of the market, he says. Pachter also reasons that an Amazon partnership with Blockbuster would put pressure on Netflix and possibly eliminate a competitor, while an Amazon partnership with Netflix probably wouldn’t inflict much damage on Blockbuster." " Netflix is a worthless piece of crap with really nice people running it. I don't mean that they're doing anything wrong. They have a wonderful idea, but it's not a sustainable business. I wish they would make it — they deserve to make it. But in the Internet, all the success stories tend to be multiple channels, [offer] multiple products, or have a brick-and-mortar component. At the end of the day, there's only one line of business going on at Netflix." Just in case anyones missed his earlier pearls of wisdom.