It all looks good for 2010 and perhaps even better for 2011. In the context of flat sales between 2006 and 2009 the massive increase in sales for 2011 shows how much Microsoft truly increased the demand for their console. Ideally in 2011 we will also see a price cut as they move down their cost curves on both the Xbox 360s and the Kinect add-on. Still their sales will as much depend on their objectives as it does on their ability to feed compelling Kinect software to the market whilst staying on top of the needs of their core gamers. I don't really fret on either point but it is something which has to be said.
Overall I would say that true growth for the consoles in 2011 may be quite limited given a lot of the PS3 purchasing and Xbox 360 purchasing may indeed be multi-console ownership which wouldn't significantly improve the overall number of titles purchased, just spread them out over a larger console install base. Furthermore I would also expect that as the population of consoles ages we will see greater numbers of rebuys especially as early 360/PS3 consoles are noisy and unreliable compared to the latest models. I would expect the true number of new console owners will be at an all time low in 2011 even if hardware price cuts cause 2011 to exceed the 2010 sales numbers.
Tease.
