Now, a lot of people don’t like Michael Pachter; they feel like he pulls things out of his ass, and that he’s consistently wrong about his predictions about the video game industry. Personally, I don’t have a problem with him. I think he manages to get about as many right as he does wrong, and in a medium where business moves both surprise and/or defy any conventional form of logic on a regular basis, batting around .500 is better than most. What’s more, predictions he makes that may not happen immediately often end up occuring, making him retroactively right. However, I don’t know that I quite buy his new prediction: the PS3 will outsell the 360 next month with 160,000 units to 115,000 units respectively. He also predicts the Wii outselling both of them combined, which I also don’t know if I buy.
Of course, he also predicted sell-through of 330,000 Wii, more than double PlayStation 3. So it wouldn’t exactly be a victory. The bump in predicted sales comes from the fact that the PlayStation 3 pricing adjustments hit in July, the drop in Xbox sales from the early negative publicity resulting from the “red ring of death” warranty issue.
Pachter predicts total industry sales of $425 million, up 13.5% from July 2006.
His reasoning seems sound, until you take a couple of things in consideration. First, sentiment for hardware reliability on the 360 was bad for literally months prior to July, and in point of fact, was arguably the worst it ever was in the last week of June. Somehow, this didn’t affect sales much, as they were largely flat from the month prior. Second, Microsoft announced their three year hardware warranty revision in the first week of July, which seemed to do a lot to alleviate concerns in gaming circles (especially on forums and message boards, and in the media) about the long term viability of the console. Public opinion of the console was arguably better in July than it had been since February, when thousands of holiday buyers of the console (who were sold on it by releases like Gears of War and Rainbow Six: Vegas) began to experience their premature hardware failure, an experience which seemed to repeat itself whenever the 360 crowd migrated to a new game.
I actually expect that 360 sales will be better for July than they were for June(not by alot, but at least a bit), for a few reasons. The warranty convinced some of the people to get off the fence and pick one up, the E3 showing reiterated the obscene amount of titles for the system in the fall, The Darkness was a solid game that continued to sustain a growing userbase (as well as Forza 2, which continues to sell), and Elites were significantly easier to find, which until around now continued to sell out quickly at retail. I do think PS3 sales will be up significantly, but I don’t think we’re going to see the kind of numbers for it that Pachter is predicting.
I could very well be wrong. But the hardware issues didn’t seem to affect 360 sales nearly as much as price has been. I’d imagine 360 sales will likely be flat, with PS3 sales in the 145,000 range, which is still phenomenal for the console, which hasn’t had a month like that since Christmas. But we’ll see. And hey, August should be even more interesting.
-Aegies