Opinion: 360 to pip PS3 this Christmas

Christmas is the definitive time of year for developers, publishers and console makers. It’s a make or break for all the hyped up games and consoles vying to lie under the tree. After months and months of foreplay, carefully teasing their exclusives and sharing some choice multi-format exchanges, the pants come off in November and things really start to get wild.

The PlayStation 3 has had the biggest changes this year: it’s slimmed down, toned its features with firmware updates and hacked away at its price something rotten to get itself the sort of attention it’s always wanted. The dodgy shine’s gone from the top of the PS3: it’s solid, harder to scratch and performing better than ever.

Games have finally caught up with (and even overhauled) their 360 counterparts, offering near-identical performance and much less demand for hard drive space. Uncharted 2: Among Thieves is the perfect exclusive: gorgeous, immensely playable and a true showcase of the raw power the system has to offer. It’s enough to give the most ardent 360 fanboys an awkward bulge in their trousers.

Even Blu-Ray, the equally vaunted and maligned victor in the HD format wars, has found its feet during 2009, with BD movie prices slowly sinking and picking up. It’s still a million miles away from being a successful format, but it’s closer than Sony’s ever been with Betamax, Minidiscs or the UMD, and crucially it’s finally affordable enough for the mass market.

The 360, on the other hand, has merely given its price a little shave and pushed the games to the forefront – particularly Modern Warfare 2, which looks set to be a shoe-in for the most popular game this Christmas. Given the massive popularity and continued success of the series on the format, you can hardly blame Microsoft.

With Natal due at some point in 2010 and the only new innovations a 250GB ‘Super Elite’ and a social networking dashboard update, Microsoft has no extra gimmicks to use this fight but the big guns: price and games. The Elite is now the happy medium, the perfect position to hit Sony where it hurts with attractively priced bundle deals.

There’s no doubt Microsoft made a much bigger deal out of Christmas 2008, breathing new life into the format with the New Xbox Experience, an almost obscenely strong games line-up and three far more attractive console options than the PS3. It was a resounding success, as much as second place can be counted as success in a multi-billion dollar industry.

The true winner for the past couple of years has, of course, been the Wii. The casual games darling has made millions of new gamers the world over, but it’s success has finally started to lag this year, with sluggish hardware sales and disastrous sales for all but a select few games. It’s led many to believe the bubble has finally burst, and if the Wii fails to deliver this Christmas it may never recover.

Last year saw the console with an anaemic line-up for the hardcore, and it’s as bad for the casuals out there. Beyond the summer’s Wii Sports Resort, Wii Fit Plus for self-conscious mums and New Super Mario Bros., all there is to look forward to is an underpowered, two year old port of the original Modern Warfare and a black version of the console. If the Wii can win with such a line-up, then the whole industry is beyond help.

So, who do we see as Winning the great Christmas Royal Rumble of 2009?

The problem with 2009 is that great purse-shaking word that hit before last Christmas: recession. It’s an evil, hateful and sadly inevitable problem that’s left our economies in an uncomfortable state of flux. Some have got through it relatively unscathed, others have barely been able to hold on and many have been outright wiped out by the crisis.

gaming got through Christmas 2008 with far more vigour and success than most expected, but we’re unlikely to repeat the same levels of success this year. 2009 could even see the first time in recent history the games industry doesn’t grow in size year-on-year, likely fuelled by a dramatic drop-off in Wii and DS sales that neither the PS3 nor 360 will be able to capitalise on.

Modern Warfare 2 is a shoe-in for Christmas Number One, despite its higher-than-usual RRP and ludicrous Night Vision Goggles, but the majority of sales will be driven by the Modern Warfare 1 and World at War user-base, who will already have their consoles.

The PS3 will see a large increase in sales, with the sleek new model and well thought-out bundles like the 250GB Slim with Uncharted 2 and friends or a handful of Blu-Rays. Sony has finally brought the console down to a price point that makes it a near-essential purchase, not the luxury it proved to be at launch.

A console with a colossal hard drive, bundled with the leading contender for Game of the Year – sounds amazing, doesn’t it? But is it really enough? Perhaps not. Microsoft has two comparable bundles of its own: both feature an Xbox 360 with a 250GB hard drive, both featuring two pads, with one coming with Forza 3 and the other with Modern Warfare 2.

Despite of Activision’s best efforts to piss off consumers with cynical price hikes in the UK, it’s still a foregone conclusion that Modern Warfare 2 will be insanely popular. And if that’s the game that finally persuades you to get a games console, a bundle deal that offers both it and a console at a comparatively cheap price point (GBP 250 in the UK, USD 399 in the States), that will be a major draw for Microsoft.

It’ll be a close-run fight, that’s for sure, but we say the 360 will win out by 25 December. The sheer selling power of Modern Warfare 2 on the console, combined with a lower price point and the added allure of Forza 3 will inevitably give it the edge it needs to win out against Sony’s resurgent behemoth. It just won’t be a rich victory, and it won’t be by much.

http://www.gameswire.net/news/opinion-360-to-pip-ps3-this-christmas_440.html

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I just hope they are talking about US ONLY....but they are obviously not as they mention UK in the 2nd last paragraph.

Either way, I doubt what they thinks gonna happen will happen

This holiday will g to:

1. Wii, 2. PS3, 3. 360

UNLESS we see a $149 Arcade!