albionus said:
Who exactly has said the 360's sales will collapse? I would say though that the odds of a 360 sales collapse are better than the odds of the 360 "outselling the Wii and PS3 together" but they are both very negligible.
I think you may be confusing the main issue which is whether the 360's sales increase somewhat next year or stay about the same. Neither really means much in the big picture (eg, the 360 will be outsold by the Wii 2:1 instead of 2.4:1) so there isn't much point being bitter about it.
There's good arguments for both the somewhat increase and stagnant sides. One of the main points for the stagnant sales side is that the 360 has not yet shown any signs of breaking out of its small hardcore gamer demographic. Price drops could help but the main problem is that it will always be overshadowed by the Wii in both price and non-hardcore gamer perception. Meanwhile on the other end Sony is bleeding itself white to match the 360 in price. Essentially in relative price terms the 360 will likely not make up much ground against the Wii and will continue lose ground to the PS3.
The point about games isn't that the 360 won't continue seeing great games, or that 2007 was the best year ever for the 360. The point is that like in price even an improvement in games would still be losing ground to the Wii and PS3. 2007 while a great year in 1st party terms was an abysmal year for the Wii in terms of 3rd party software. 2008 will also be a great year for 1st party games and 3rd party games will see a major improvement (no stickball, I'm not saying Wii 3rd party support will be better than 360 3rd party support). The PS3 has pretty much gotten 2 types of games in 2007, delayed or rushed. As devs get a better handle on the PS3's complicated architecture next years games will also see a marked improvement. Even should 2008 be better for the 360 than 2007 it will be extremely difficult to get more than small improvement in overall quality. So relatively the 360 will fall behind.
Generally after 2 years a systems sales are pretty much fixed. This has already been seen with the 360 where despite 2007 blowing 2006 away in 360 game quality, despite the 360's game library simply putting the PS3's to shame and challenging Nintendo's lineup, despite winning the hearts and minds of the most vocal gamers, despite having the best advantage it will likely see in price vs its main competitor, despite major efforts by MS to expand in Japan and Europe, despite the biggest entertainment launch in history, despite the Wii being seriously underproduced, despite basically having more going its way than maybe any console in history, the 360 only saw a small increase in sales from 2006 which was itself just a small increase from the sales rate of the Xbox.
So what the stagnant argument boils down to is that bereft of most of those advantages from 2007, how can the 360 be expected to sell anything but a little better next year? Again, no sales won't collapse. Also again, there are good arguments, like the ones you made, for why the 360 could get a boost next year. We'll just have to wait and see what happens. As for when the PS3 overtakes the 360, well it's not likely to happen next year that's for sure. The PS3 would need a huge jump in sales next year while the 360 stagnates for that to occurr. Not impossible just not very likely. Should the PS3 have any chance of overtaking the 360 we'll see next year. If by 2009 the PS3 is 6-9 million units behind it is very unlikely since the PS3's sales will reach the fixed point. However, if the PS3 can make up a decent amount of ground on the 360 so it is say only 3 or 4 million units behind then it becomes plausible by the end of 2009. If the PS3 makes up even more ground than that, which I think is extremely unlikely, then an early 2009 switch becomes possible. |
