Malstrom: Nintendo’s Shield & Defense = “Sustained” Disruption?

[Avinash_Tyagi]

Alby_da_Wolf said:
^^
You make some good points, I can't deny it, but you leap too fast to conclusions, maybe.
About the old market shrinking, I suspect it's still more or less slowly growing, instead, but obviously Nintendo still having the whole new one all for itself, while MS and Sony must divide the old one, makes their slices look smaller.
More than a threat for the old market, the new one is a missed opportunity for Sony and MS, if they don't deveelop anything to get a share of it.
But this gen is roughly at the middle of its life as the latest one, and at 1/3 of its life or even less if we take into account also the years the current consoles will be sold as low end models when 8th gen will be the latest. So it's way too early to deduct a definitive trend. I agree with you that Wand and Natal won't grab significant slices of new market from Nintendo, I don't agree that the old market sends signals of shrinking, good games sell well, HW sells decently, and bad games and/or bad management do disasters, as they always did, nothing new about it.

Problem is if it was gorwing, we wouldn't be hearing of devs being shut down, people being laid off, companies taking huge losses and companies trying to push things like DLC or kill used game sales and rentals.  Its even deeper than just Sony and MS, its the developers as well, look at EA, and Kotick sold most of his Activision shares, meaning he's ready to jump ship when the thing falls apart.

 

It used to be that even bad games wouldn't kill a studio or a publisher, now with all the costs, one really bad game can put a dev on the road to shutting down, like Factor 5, the New Market on the other hand is growing and is wealthy and healthy, where games can make far more than their development cost, and sell for months even years, that's another thing, the old market is very front loaded, the new market has strong legs, if a game doesn't sell like crazy in its first two weeks in the old market, its dead, in the new market, it can sell for years slow and steady, which is why you end up with these monster titles with 20 million plus sales