Borkachev on 29 June 2007
These analysts are idiots. They change their prediction whenever the masses' opinions start to shift.
As they should. The masses' opinion determines the market, after all.
That doesn't excuse their being wrong earlier (speaking generally; I don't know if these specific analysts were), but I'll take an analysis like this grounded in reality over someone like Pachter, who sticks to his guns that "PS3 will sell 120 million" despite all current evidence to the contrary.
I actually liked this article. It doesn't make a lot of bold predictions, so I don't know what good it is to the people who fund these guys (but then it seems to be written for the layman anyway), but everything it says is very sensible.
Something that seems to get overlooked a lot, though:
On the other hand, for many big ticket franchises the Wii may not be appropriate. The Wii is a great system, but it has its limits and a fairly unique appeal. This could present a problem for all the slow moving third-party publishers that are now scrambling to up their Wii output. By the time third-party developers start flooding the Wii market with product, the excitement may have cooled.
When those third-party products hit, it won't matter anymore if the launch excitement has cooled. They'll generate their own excitement. Once the Wii secured its developer support, it secured its future. I get the feeling these guys just felt they needed to cover all their bases by coming up with a way the Wii could fail.
Of course, this assumes that a lot of great third-party titles actually are on their way. We keep hearing about all the publishers flocking to support the Wii, but so far we've seen very little in terms of actual games to get excited about. I'm hoping some of this will start coming out at E3.
