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Polarimetric on 20 February 2010
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Slimebeast said:

Your wrong. There's customers for every price point. Splitting the market into just two groups, hardcore who already bought HD and the casuals who buy cheap (Wii) is far too simple.

I know there are millions of guys out there that owned a PS2 (or the similar type, but just were born a decade later), that aren't super interested in gaming and aren't the people who buy 30 or 40 games in a generation, but they want to play some cool games. Often impulse buyers. Not all of these want to spend $300 on a console and not all of these want a Wii, and even if they did a lot of them will want their GTA's and Call of Dutys too.

7 million X360s... Why would the X360 start tanking like that next year? We're at the peak of this gen. Almost no software companies are speaking of next gen. There's no rumours about next gen hardware. PS3 just reached mass market price. MS is pushing Natal hard for Nov 2010 and next year. This year is the biggest year for games since 2003 (or 2001, I don't know lol). 2011 will see a $149 Xbox 360. This is the golden age of HD.

I don't believe that you can expect impulse buyers to come out in droves big enough to buck the natural trend of sales decreasing as a system gets older. We are in the peak of this generation -- absolutely -- but reaching the peak of this generation has resulted in a PS3 sales explosion while the 360 has seen little or no sales benefit. America is the only region where the 360 can outsell the PS3, and the 360 isn't outselling the PS3 in big enough margins even with huge exclusives (Mass Effect 2) moving consoles. The PS3 has outsold the 360 weekly worldwide pretty consistently for 2010 and it began to do so in the end of 2009. The 360 is going to have to start outselling the PS3 consistently if there's any hope for it to sell 10 million in 2011, much less in 2010.

The 360 has been underselling itself year-over-year by about 13% for multiple weeks in 2010 now. If that trend continues, which I strongly believe it will, and the 360's total sales for 2010 ends up 13% below the total sales for 2009, the 360 will sell 9.2 million in 2010. With a 13% reduction already setting in for 2010 and the threat of a new generation looming for 2011, Natal is going to have to be one great console mover for the 360 to even reach 9 million in 2011.

7 million 360s is not "tanking." That's a reduction of about a third -- as a much younger console in 2007, the 360 moved 7.8 million units. 7 million is far from a "ridiculous" number. The 360 has had quite an impressive run of huge exclusives in the past couple years, and even with that, it has failed to sell at a pace that will make 70 million a legitimate projection.

 

If Natal is successful, of course, all of this can be thrown out and the 360 may well move to 80 million. It's all about the price, the performance, and the developer support.