Trying to predict the future is a tricky business; sometimes, things go wildly differently to what we expect, resulting in predictions that sound hilarious years later.

What are some predictions about gaming that you find hilarious in how wrong they turned out to be?

I'll start: in 2009, Michael Pachter predicted that the Wii/PS3/360 generation would be the "last generation of consoles."

“I think we’ve seen the last generation of consoles. [Third party publishers] are not going to support a PS4 or Xbox 720,” he said. “The content is not going to change in any meaningful ways because the publishers can’t afford it.”

What are some of your favs?

I remember most of us laughing our asses off when Nintendo unveiled the Wii for the first time. We were like, okay, so you fail miserably with the Gamecube, and your answer is this nonsense? Are you kidding? We were all but certain this would be the end of the company.

Then we saw all the people stampeding over each other to play it at that years E3 and... well... crow meet mouth.

I also believe there were more than a fair share of people predicting the DS's demise because Sony had entered the picture with what seemed to be the PS1 situation all over again (better tech, disc-based media etc). That didn't work out so well, either. Although in the end, the PSP did finish respectably.

I thought the Wii U and the PS Vita were going to be big deals

Anything Patcher says, the opposite is true anyways.

https://www.ign.com/articles/2011/10/22/the-playstation-vita-is-set-to-succeed

When IGN predicted the Vita would be a success.

Ah, I was gonna do that one too!

It's extra hilarious cos he claimed Vita will outsell 3DS and, well...

It was the common consensus at the time. DS was mocked for being seen as the next Virtual Boy and images like this popped up online.

EGM predicted that the PSP would slaughter the DS. I mean, Nintendo was low-key worried about it as well. That's why they went out of their way to position the DS as a complement to, rather than a replacement for, the Game Boy line.

A year or so later, with the DS riding high on Nintendogs, EGM posted an article saying "we were wrong."

The same scenario repeated itself with the Switch, coming off of the Wii U. 

Our most famous wrongest predictor, QuickRick with the infamous "Switch sales going down a cliff after the first year or two of sales".

So glad I was there to witness this mark in VGC's history

https://www.vgchartz.com/article/460539/michael-pachter-predicts-xbox-game-pass-will-top-200-million-subscribers-in-10-years/

Well there's 2 more years left...





Here's a fun one from 2011

https://www.theguardian.com/society/2011/jan/02/25-predictions-25-years

10 Gaming: 'We'll play games to solve problems'

In the last decade, in the US and Europe but particularly in south-east Asia, we have witnessed a flight into virtual worlds, with people playing games such as Second Life. But over the course of the next 25 years, that flight will be successfully reversed, not because we're going to spend less time playing games, but because games and virtual worlds are going to become more closely connected to reality.

There will be games where the action is influenced by what happens in reality; and there will be games that use sensors so that we can play them out in the real world – a game in which your avatar is your dog, which wears a game collar that measures how fast it's running and whether or not it's wagging its tail, for example, where you play with your dog to advance the narrative, as opposed to playing with a virtual character. I can imagine more physical activity games, too, and these might be used to harness energy – peripherals like a dance pad that actually captures energy from your dancing on top of it.

...

Pokemon Go came and went and mixed reality turns out to be a detriment to gaming.

Now this did age well from 2011



But nor because we're generating energy while playing 'games' now.